Jan Carson joins Podcaster in Residence Zoë Comyns to talk about photography and how images can open the door to fiction . Jan discusses her multitasking approach to reading, her grandmother’s photographs including candid and amusing photographs taken around the North of Ireland. Jan has written a specially commissioned short story for this podcast, imagining a fictional reader, inspired by the collection item:
CLON1989 from the National Photographic Archive - a glass plate negative of [Augusta Caroline Dillon and Luke Gerald Dillon with camera on tripod reflected in a large mirror, Clonbrock, Ahascragh, Co. Galway, circa 1865]
Jan says “ I think in terms of composition, I really like that kind of stripped backness. It's reflected in the room, but it's also feels reflected in the art. I spent some time in the Clonbrock collection looking at other photographs, and this one feels slightly different from a lot of the others because there are beautiful landscapes. There are arrangements of, you know, groups of people.”
“So for me, my process when I'm responding to something like this is to write straight away and respond. And within like a half an hour of looking at this, I had an idea for a story. Kevin Barry talks about…guarding against going down a research rabbit hole by writing the piece first and then highlighting what it is you need to research
So when I had begun to write the piece, then I decided I would go back and do a little bit more research to fill it out afterwards. I am a very, very nosy writer, and if I start to research, I get really easily distracted.
[The Dillon Family] were ahead of their times because they were all so obsessed with photography. There are organised family photographs and then there are also ones of, of children playing and I also love that they went out of their way to take photographs of people who worked on the estate. So it's not just a kind of catalogue of the rich and the affluent. There's some really gorgeous very lived in photographs of people doing their jobs on the estate, which is fascinating to see so early on.”
