Images of the past are Tara’s future
TARA Keown has a ‘permanent’ job. She is the manager of the Lensmen Press and Public Relations Photographic Agency archive which spans six decades and comprises 2.6m negatives. She started last year, scanning, captioning, cleaning and uploading 10,000 images onto the website. At that rate, she has 20 years of work.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves are stacked deep and high, containing boxes upon boxes of photographic plates, film and 35mm strips. Despite the magnitude of the task, Tara is excited not daunted. “I can’t see the job going anywhere soon,” she says, “but it is always interesting. Every time you open a box there is something new, and you never really know quite what you will find. Finding work with Irish Photo Archive was really a dream come true; working here is fascinating and I adore it. While it can be time consuming, and to many it may seem tedious, I seldom tire of it — because there’s always the anticipation of new and exciting images lying just around the corner.”
