BIO: Leland Lewis DUNCAN was born in Lewisham, Kent, England on 24th August 1862, to Leland Crosthwait Duncan and Caroline Ellen LEWIS. His father, a grandson of Leland CROSTHWAIT, Governor General. of the Bank of Ireland, had left Ireland for London in 1851 and after his marriage settled in Lewisham. Duncan's father worked in the civil service and was much respected in Lewisham, being involved in the running of St. Mary's Anglican Parish Church and local schools. In 1880 Duncan left Colfe's Grammer School and went on a "grand tour" which included visiting his cousins in Dublin and Sligo, but it was the visit to his cousins of the landed gentry in Co. Leitrim that was to make the greatest impact on him. Leland Duncan and his two younger sisters, Caroline Annette and Amy Adela, had enjoyed a secure middle-class Victorian upbringing, and in 1882, Duncan entered the War Office and rose through the ranks to be awarded an MVO and an OBE. He was unmarried and became a keen amateur historian and photographer, with close links to Ireland. His sister Carrie married an Irish first cousin, James SLACKE, of Annadale, Co. Leitrim, and during the 1880s and 1890s Duncan spent most of his summer holidays there, listening to stories and collecting folklore from the servants and tenants He took this collection of photographs between 1889 and 1894, and kept a scrapbook of notes to locate them. His subjects ranged from the big house and the mud cabin, to the well-dressed landlord's daughter and the impoverished peasant. Through his camera lens he captured the men drinking Guinness after the rick of hay is finished, the straw-boy dressed for the wedding party, the woman at her spinning ! wheel, the barefooted postboy and the big-boned blacksmith. This remarkable collection of over 100 photographs gives a unique and intimate view of rural life in the NW of Ireland during late-Victorian times. A marvelous book was subsequently published containing more than 100 of Duncan's photographs and remarks with text by Liam KELLY, an author born in Leitrim in 1952, an author of "Kiltubrid" (1984) a parish history --- "The Face of Time, Leland Lewis Duncan 1862-1923, Photographs of Co. Leitrim," (Lilliput Press/Dublin, 1995). Irish author John McGAHERN wrote in the foreword: "Duncan's photographs have the fascination of nearly all old photographs. Time that is still our element has already washed over these lives, and they seem to look at us out of a depth of time or waters in fashions that have ceased. What an added pleasure it is to see how unselfconscious these people are. They could not imagine how they would look in a photograph. Their mute presences are more eloquent than any idea of self. This is further reinforced by the relatively rudimentary techniques of the period Duncan was working in. They document a society in a time and place, and all the images are picked with care. That he chose to focus on a poor cottage, a barefooted woman in a doorway, two servant girls in their Sunday finery, is significant: but more telling of the eye which he brought to his craft is the angle of the house, the broom next to the doorway, the placing of the birdcage, etc. I believe that he had a su! re grasp on the limitations of photography, its built-in objectivity, and that he was able to use it to express his patent sympathy with the people he was photographing. How, otherwise, could these pictures speak to us so movingly across all the years? They speak to us out of a world that has disappeared; but such is the magic and mystery of art that they do so with a richness and depth that life rarely gives. Time has become reflection."