Alfred Martin 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, where he gave the still largely untouched by westernization of life of the rural population photographically.
The Duggan - Cronin was born in Ireland attended the Mount St. Mary's College in Derby, Derbyshire. Originally he pursued the goal of becoming Jesuit priest, but later rejected these plans and went to South Africa in 1897. There he took a job with the Kimberley diamond producer De Beers, for whom he worked until his retirement in 1932.
1904 acquired Duggan - Cronin his first camera, a simple box camera, and began to experiment with portraits, still life and animal studies. In 1919, he broke his first photographic expedition into the Langeberg Mountains, in order to document the tribal life of the San. In the next twenty years brought him many other travel in - from 1930, accompanied by the Mfengu Richard Madela - through the entire southern Africa. In this case, the life of the indigenous peoples of Africa always remained focus of his work.
Its 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 1928-1954 in a series of eleven photo books.