The ‘snapshot’ in the title of this valuable book by Erika Hanna works in two ways. It denotes both the photography that is the main focus of the text, and the author's approach that offers a deft succession of themes and case studies fixed on photographic production in twentieth- century Ireland. It is published at a time that historians in Ireland increasingly draw on and refer to visual and material culture in their work, but often without due consideration or understanding of the conditions within which such cultural artefacts were made or understood.

As Hanna outlines in the introduction, the work builds on ‘an exciting field of Irish photographic history’ (p. 9), which she later says has mainly been understood through ‘the dynamic of the colonial gaze’ (p. 10), although those dynamics are rendered more complex if we include exhibitions and publications such as the excellent Source magazine. She aligns her concerns more with recent currents in Irish social history and is particularly interested in how people used photography ‘in order to mediate, interpret, and interrogate their understanding of state and nation, and their place within it’ (p. 13).

Organised around six chapters, Hanna fits an impressive amount of information and analysis into what is a relatively short book. She asserts that it is about ‘what it meant to see in Ireland during the twentieth century’ (p. 1), and this pithy phrase of course needs to be further qualified, as her starting points are with the producers of photographic images rather than their consumers or viewers, and the book is about seeing through photographs and the tools used to make them, not other forms of visual culture such as advertisements, graphic design, fine art or film. She provides useful ways into thinking about seeing more generally, including a helpful discussion about how metaphors of visibility and invisibility have been mobilised in Irish historiography.

A winning quality of the volume is the sense of discovery Hanna makes the reader feel, most strongly communicated in the first chapter which starts with an evocative vignette about how we might respond when we come across an old photograph album in an archive or a junk shop, how they hold both a sense of familiarity but unknowingness, how the album ‘frustrates as it beguiles’ (p. 16). Giving some sense of the wealth of albums in the National Photographic Archive, she then concentrates on three examples, and what they suggest about ‘how young people curated and narrated stories of their lives’. This includes what they made visible and what they kept secret.

One fascinating case study involves the twenty-three albums of Dorothy Stokes (1898–1982), a woman who was deeply involved in the musical life of Ireland, eventually becoming Professor of Theory and of Piano at the ‘Royal Academy of Music’ (p. 25), presumably the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. Her albums, made between 1925 and 1953, document an urban and bohemian life largely focused around her close female friends, her holidays in Ireland and Europe, and include depictions of herself with images of her cars, often with the legend ‘Owner and Owned’. Hanna's discussion of how such captions reinforced or provided counter-points to the images, and how albums create particular narratives is important ― too often historians use or discuss photographs wrested away from their captions and their actual material setting and relationality within the implied narrative of an album, or on a particular page of a newspaper. Noting what Stokes did not include in the albums ― particularly her intimate relationships ― Hanna shows how she both asserted an agency that exceeded the prevailing ideals of Irish womanhood but in its visual record was confined by the norms of snapshot photography.

This theme of established practice determining what was and was not photographed pervades the book, and the significance of self-presentation according to certain conventions is to the fore in the second chapter, which deals with studio portraiture and visual tropes of respectability. The case studies are drawn from the archives of two Waterford studios, and are highly suggestive about the maintenance of familial image and wider bonds through the display and circulation of photographs as well as the techniques the studios employed to mask hard-working hands and tired eyes. The third chapter addresses photography clubs and how they visualised the Irish landscape, a subject that warrants deeper investigation, not least because of the ways such clubs as well as other forms of associational culture such as cycling and hostelling afforded new recreational opportunities, and the more general rise of the countryside as a site of mass leisure.

Subsequent chapters are more overtly concerned with the politics of making photographs, from the ways different working-class communities were encouraged to represent themselves in the 1970s and 1980s, to press photographers in Northern Ireland, to photography that documented poverty and power in the 1980s. The latter is informed by important oral histories conducted with Frankie Quinn, Derek Speirs and Joanne O'Brien, the great chronicler of Irish migrants in Britain and a founder of the woman-only agency Format who became known for their coverage of the Greenham Common Peace Camp in particular.

While clearly impossible to encompass all aspects of such a large subject, I think the section on recent developments in photography in Ireland would benefit from some adjustments in any further editions of the book. The author offers a list of higher education institutions where photography is taught as an academic subject, but excludes Technological University Dublin (formerly Dublin Institute of Technology), which is one of the very few Irish higher education institutions that runs a B.A. degree specifically dedicated to photography. Its graduates have had a major influence on the development of photographic culture in Ireland over the past two decades, not least through the annual PhotoIreland festival that is one of the most important foruns for critical discussion about photography on the island. In terms of the assertion that ‘Professional and artistic photography is still jarringly masculine’ (p. 242), it is worth noting the many contemporary female photographers in Ireland who have created important work, exhibited and published widely, and been recognised internationally – including Amelia Stein, Dragana Jurišić, Mandy O'Neill and Miriam O'Connor.

Each chapter of Snapshot stories bursts with ideas, new research and highly suggestive indicators of how much more work could and should be undertaken on photography as both visual and material culture, the study of which would lead to a greater understanding of everyday life in Ireland and how it was experienced, shaped and seen. If its readership includes those who work and study in university history departments, it exemplifies the value of expanding the scope of historiographic method to include a serious engagement with the ways in which images and artefacts can be mobilised not only to illustrate history but to help us understand it.