Images of the past are Tara’s future

Uploading six decades of work from the Lensmen Photographic Agency is an epic task, says Colette Keane

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.”

The negatives from the 1950s are on glass plates, while the boxes from the ’60s, ’70s and much of the ’80s are black-and-white film; after which colour predominates. She spends her day scanning negatives, editing, captioning and ‘cleaning’, which means photoshopping dust or scratches, then uploading them.

Tara started with the oldest material — the glass plates. There were only 14 plates available to the photographer, so they were cautious about using them — every one a gem. “I am always amazed by the quality. They are so clear. Last week, I opened a box with photos from 1969 of the barricades in Belfast. And they had obviously had a creative day. There are images of boys peering through barbed wire. You can really see their personality {the photographers} in these types of images. They rarely went to Belfast so the box was a real surprise.”

The photographers are the founders of Lensman, Andy Farren and Padraig MacBrien, who set it up in 1952. Most of the pictures are Dublin-based, but both men regularly holidayed in Cork and Limerick — and took their cameras. Tara advises using a broad search, such as ‘Cork’ or ‘Howth’, when checking the archive. There has been an upsurge in the number of people searching it. “Maybe it’s a recessionary thing, going back to the past, but people just love these types of images.”

The time capsule of Irish history includes the visits of The Beatles, Princess Grace, Muhammad Ali and John F Kennedy, the inaugurations of Ireland’s Presidents and football and hurling finals.

For Tara, the pictures are social history. “I am most drawn to the images of old towns and villages. I think most people love to look back on these old photographs to see what the place looked like 40 or 50 years ago or what people are wearing.”

Susan Kennedy took over the business and archive in 1995, and says the snapshots of Irish life are more special than the photos of State occasions. “What, I feel, makes the collection even more valuable, historically speaking, are the images of day-to-day Irish life — street scenes, dog shows, weddings, communions, office presentations and family portraits.”

Putting more than 60 years of images onto the website will preserve this vast collection for generations.

Tara also handles enquires from the public looking for images of relatives, newspapers looking for images to accompany stories, and publishers who need images to illustrate books.

Originally from Fermanagh, Tara moved to Limerick to study and then to Dublin last July. Shortly after, the street she lived on was flooded. While her house escaped damage, one of her neighbours was badly hit. Tara looked up the North Strand on her archive. There were pictures of the street flooded in 1954 and a picture of her neighbour’s house with a boat going through the front door. Tara printed them off and showed them to her neighbours and they became a conversation piece.

A local historian in Howth contacted her about the collection of people fishing and offered to track them down, and she hopes more people will provide information on other images in the collection.

“The digitisation of the archive is a monumental task and there is a huge amount of work still to be done, but the satisfaction you get from making these magnificent images available to the public is lovely. The knowledge that this task of preservation will stop history from slowly decaying on a shelf is wholly rewarding and I feel privileged to be involved,” Tara said.

If you can identify any of the photographs, contact Tara at:[e-mail].

* www.irishphotoarchive.ie