This  thesis  examines  the  politics  inherent  in  photographic  imaging  of  place   and  space  in  nineteenth-­‐century  Ireland.  It  is  a  critical-­‐historical  analysis  of   five  separate  phases  of  activity  between  1842  and  1897  –  a  period  during   which  politics  on  the  island  of  Ireland  was  dramatically  transformed,  while   the  evolution  of  photographic  technologies  was  radical  in  its  shift  from  slow   artisanal  processes  to  mass-­‐market  industrialised  protocols.  The  first   chapter,  ‘The  Military  Observer’,  considers  a  number  of  Calotype  images,   made  by  Captain  Henry  Craigie  Brewster  while  he  was  stationed  in  County   Cork  as  an  army  officer  during  the  winter  and  spring  of  1842-­‐43.  They   remain  the  earliest  known  surviving  Irish  photographs,  produced  within  a   visual  regime  where  the  instability  of  colonial  power  is  manifest  in  tentative   images  of  territory.  Chapter  Two,  ‘The  Invisible  Famine’,  analyses  the   implications  that  unfold  from  the  absence  of  Famine  photographs,  drawing   attention  to  a  crisis  in  the  field  of  visual  representation  produced  by   encounters  with  disaster.  In  the  following  section,  ‘Big  House  Photography:   Space,  Place  and  Modernity’,  the  position  of  photography  emanating  from   Anglo-­‐Irish  society  in  mid-­‐century  is  considered  from  a  perspective  that   seeks  to  expand  the  limited  readings  afforded  up  to  now,  and  suggests  new   accounts  of  images  that  have  often  been  presented  as  narrow  signifiers  of   social  privilege.  The  penultimate  chapter,  ‘Visualising  the  Rise  and  Fall  of   New  Tipperary’,  is  focused  on  how  contending  photographic  languages   mediated  one  of  the  key  battlegrounds  in  the  Plan  of  Campaign’s  conflict   with  a  government-­‐backed  syndicate  of  landlords  in  1889-­‐90.  The  uses  to   which  the  images  were  put  demonstrate  how  photographs  became  more   deeply  enmeshed  in  mediatised  political  narratives  during  the  late-­‐ nineteenth  century.  The  final  section,  ‘Imaging  and  Imagining  Eviction’,   critically  examines  Maud  Gonne’s  1897  appropriation  of  eviction  images  for   a  political  street  protest  during  Queen  Victoria’s  Diamond  Jubilee,  and  offers   a  partially  speculative  reading  of  the  moment  that  addresses  the  conceptual   unmooring  of  photographs from authorship and historically at the turn of the twentieth century.