Perhaps your library has the book, "Dorothea Lange's Ireland," with all the marvelous photos of the people of Co. Clare. This photographer from Hoboken, NJ was best known for her series of haunting images from the USA Depression. In the 1950s, she chose Ireland as her subject upon reading a 1937 book written by a Harvard anthropologist, "The Irish Countryman." Though elderly and ill when she undertook the photographic series for "Life" magazine, she was successful in capturing in stark and evocative photographs the realities of life in County Clare in the mid 1950s. Lange traveled with her son, Daniel Dixon. Nineteen of her photos appeared in the March 21, 1955, issue of "Life" in an essay title "Irish Country People." Lange had taken more than 2,000 photos, and her work was later uncovered in the archive at the Oakland Museum in California, by writer Gerry Mullins, and it became the subject of the book, "Dorothea Lange's Ireland." Lange evidently had remained in touc! h with many of the people she had met in Clare for a number of years. Lange had became a photographer at the age of 17. Her "Migrant Mother" is one of the world's most famous photographs, and a print of her "White Angel Breadline" sold for $54,000 in 1994, but her images of Ireland had languished unnoticed in the archives for over 30 years. The book contains more than 100 of these fine photographs. Her son, Daniel Dixon, who contributed to the book, said his mother had a clear affinity with Ireland and its people. He quoted his mother as saying, "Ireland is always contrary, you know. But once in a while, the whole earth smiles for a minute, and then it's different." When she once snapped an old man approaching on a lonely road, Lange explained her choice of subject. "That's pure Ireland. He was just made out of that wet, limey soil. Made out it." . "Dorothea Lange's Ireland" contains many heart-warming photos of the people, including some of the O'Halloran family - Anne, holding the fresh soda bread she baked every few days, Catherine, and little Bridie O'Halloran. There is a photo of barefoot boys skipping down the road to school, a couple chatting at the corner of Lower Market Street and O'Connell Street, a regular meeting place for young people in Ennis. The town's only picture house, "The Gaiety," is across the street and so probably the reason that people gathered there. There is also a photo of young Michael Kenneally on his 30 acres at the brow of Mount Callan, the house having been built by Michael's grandfather. Until the day she died in 1965, Dorothea had one or another of her photos from Ireland pinned to her studio wall or displayed on a piece of corkboard in the kitchen. "Look at that face," she'd say of a photograph of an Irish girl smiling in the rain, "isn't that a beautiful face? That's Ireland. That's pure Ireland." -- Excerpt, "Irish America" magazine