SAY '60s to almost anybody and they think of Carnaby Street and miniskirts and the pill and the Beatles . . . they think about young people and a flowering of sexual energy and pleasure. But 20thcentury Ireland was always at least a decade behind the rest of the first world . . . and in the 21st still is, in matters like uneven access to contraception and allowing small children to be hit.

And some decades in Ireland were even more out of sync with their international image than others. The 1950s, for example, might as well have been the Dark Ages, so hopeless and sorrowful an experience of living did Ireland offer to most of its people then. And the 1950s lasted into the 1960s . . . well in. To the middle of the decade, at least. Youth was having a careless good time everywhere else, but not where the vicious attitudes of a peasant church still reigned and a girl who got pregnant had to get the fellow to marry her or be ruined for life. That puts a dampener on the bliss of sex.

The joylessness of that Ireland is represented in Edward Quinn's photos, both as a presence and an absence, and whether he knew it or not. At some time in that decade he came back from the riviera . . . from bright light and colour to monochrome . . . to make a photographic essay of the Dublin that was James Joyce's native city, and his own. Quinn was an intimate of Picasso, so he had experience of the esteem in which a modernist master can be held. It must have been astonishing to him to find that there was almost no knowledge of or regard for Joyce in the sorrowful Dublin of the time . . . a Dublin in which the pain of the mass emigration and unemployment of the 1950s persisted.

Nationally . . . I was a student at University College, Dublin at the beginning of the '60s . . . at that time Joyce's work was not represented on the curriculum of the English literature department of UCD. And UCD was James Joyce's alma mater.

Internationally, Joyce studies didn't begin to take off until around the time of the first Joyce Symposium, which was held in 1967 and which I remember as a blur of bright, smart Americans who thought Dublin was wonderful and the likes of myself picturesque. A small, elite market for Edward Quinn's Dublin photographs would have been established by those Joyceans from academies.

Before that, there was no little or no attention paid to Bloomsday, outside the literati of the pubs around Grafton Street. That is to say . . . the male literati. When John Ryan and Myles na Gopaleen and Anthony Cronin went on their famous, groundbreaking Bloomsday skite they returned that night . . .

no doubt very much the worse for wear . . . to women. But it was absolutely unimaginable that women would be invited to accompany them. Wives and mothers didn't mix well with the general squalor, poverty and drunkenness of that era, where it took great toughness to write. Nevertheless, there were women who frequented the writers' pubs , and they were not the only women at large in 1950s and early 1960s Ireland.

But there are no women at all in Quinn's photo-essay. This is the amazing statistic: out of 131 photographs in his book James Joyce's Dublin, 12 of which form part of the London exhibition, exactly one is of a woman. There's an oul' wan or two in street pictures. Otherwise, the camera rests with affection on men . . . especially old men . . .

boys, and the low, plain, Edwardian city itself.

The absence is not because of Joyce. The stories in Dubliners . . . think about it . . . over and over again pivot on girls and women. The Dublin of Ulysses has many memorable women, quite apart from the presiding genius of Molly Bloom. There are, for example, seven arty photos of Sandymount Strand in the book . . . not one of people on the strand to remind us of Gerty and the marvellous complex of human desires that stem from her presence there.

The absence is not because of Quinn's style. He took many charming photos of ordinary people. It's just that they're all male. And nor is the absence unique to Edward Quinn. Not long ago I viewed some of the newsreel film from that same Ireland which Louis Marcus has archived. A few hatted and gloved women decorously demonstrating cookery, or simpering as air hostesses, are the only images, from half the population, that I can recall. It was shocking to see that the society I grew up in might, but for the clothes, have been Saudi Arabia.

Women existed, of course, but nobody was interested in showing them in their homes or out in the fields or cowering in the few jobs allowed them or carrying their suitcases to the emigrant boat. Nobody valued them.

The insult was the more comprehensive for being, as in Quinn's photo-essay, quite unconscious.

The poor were as brutally disrespected as women in that terrible Ireland. Their minds, their spirits, the capacities of their bodies, their gifts, their artistry counted for nothing, either. But poor men can at least be seen in the photos of such as Edward Quinn. There is proof, at least, that before they were shipped out to be coolies in other countries, they existed.

Quinn's images are not true to Joyce, who was as womanly as he was manly. They're not true to his own experience . . . as a celebrity photographer he encountered many powerful and striking women. What they're true to is the paralysed Dublin Joyce himself identified, eliding as they do all manifestations of energy and freedom and vitality from the shabby capital of a failed country.

'Edward Quinn: A Day's Work' Exhibition 26 April. . .17 June, Michael Hoppen Gallery, London Tel 00 44207 352 3649 www. michaelhoppen gallery. com