Alfred Duggan-Cronin
Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin (born May 17, 1874 in Innishannon , County Cork , † August 25, 1954 , buried in Kimberley ) was an Irish-South African photographer. Between 1919 and 1939 he traveled through southern Africa and photographed the life of the rural population, which was largely untouched by western modernization.
Irish-born Duggan-Cronin attended Mount St. Mary's College in Derbyshire, England . He originally pursued the goal of becoming a Jesuit priest , but later rejected these plans and went to South Africa in 1897 . There he took a job in Kimberley at the diamond manufacturer De Beers , for which he worked until his retirement in 1932.
In 1904, Duggan-Cronin acquired his first camera, a simple box camera , and began experimenting with portraits, still lifes, and animal studies. In 1919 he set out on his first photographic expedition to the Langeberg Mountains to document tribal life of the San . In the following twenty years he took numerous other trips - from 1930 in the company of Mfengu Richard Madela - through all of southern Africa. The life of the indigenous peoples of Africa always remained the focus of his work.
His collection of more than 8,000 photographs and ethnographic artifacts is now housed in the McGregor Museum in Kimberley . Part of his work was published between 1928 and 1954 in a series of eleven photo books.
Exhibitions
- 1924: British Empire Exhibition , London
- 2007: Thandabantu: a photographic journey through Southern Africa 1919-1939 , Cape Town
Individual evidence
- ^ Robert Hart The McGregor Museum's Photographic Collections with a special emphasis on the historic negatives. (PDF file; 59 kB)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Duggan-Cronin, Alfred |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Duggan-Cronin, Alfred Martin (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Irish-South African photographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 17, 1874 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Innishannon , County Cork |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 25, 1954 |
| Place of death | buried, Kimberley (South Africa) |