The Photograph as a Site of Mnemonic Return, Using the Photograph to Preserve, Construct and Trigger Memory Presented at Art, Memory, Place Research Seminars, Irish Museum of Modern Art https://www.imma.ie/en/downloads/imma_art_-_memory_- __place_12_13_nov_2015_programme_and_abstracts.pdf Dr. Martina Cleary PhD MA MEd. In September in 1954 Dorothea Lange began a six-week assignment for Life Magazine, shooting rural life in Clare, a county on the western seaboard of Ireland. Based for the duration of her stay at the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis, she hired a car and travelled out daily into local villages and town lands to document rural existence as she found it. Lange was fifty-nine years of age when she visited Ireland and it was her first trip outside of America. She travelled with her son Daniel Dixon, who was to write an accompanying photo essay for her images. Prior to visiting Ireland, Lange read The Irish Countryman, a book written in 1937 by the Harvard based academic and anthropologist Conrad Arensberg. His text was based on observations made during a year of field studies in the small village of Lough in North-West Clare. Linda Gordon in her autobiography on Lange, A Life Beyond Limits, (2009, p370) notes that in Ireland Lange was searching for something of the rural unspoiled relationship between people, community and the land that marked her project on Mormon life in America. Gordon also comments that Lange’s preparation included defining symbolic, descriptive and analytic categories of topics to capture, with an identified list of particular subjects planned in advance. These included, ‘emigration; congregations; the temperament and the weather…the church, the creamers, the fair’, and technical specifications including angle of view on her subjects. She also found and concentrated on a number of families, including the O’Hallorans of Inagh whose two daughters were about to emigrate to America, and the inhabitants of the farmstead of Michael Kenneally, who was over time to become the most iconic subject in this body of work. During the six-week assignment, Lange shot some 2,400 images, but only nineteen of these made the final edit, half of what was initially planned. According to Gerry Mullins (1998), Dixon’s original text was also replaced by that of an in-house writer and Lange was so unhappy with the final article, she never worked for Life magazine again. Her images from Ireland remained largely unknown, buried in the archives of the Oakland Museum until the early 1990’s when Mullins, an Irish freelance journalist living in San Francisco discovered the work by chance while searching for an Irish interest item for the Gael newspaper. His subsequent book Dorothea Lange’s Ireland (1998), is the first and only comprehensive overview of these images to date, and includes ninety eight full plate images, with accompanying articles by both Mullins