Gerry Hannan

Limerick Archive Gerry Hannan

We Are Who We Were The Limerick History Gazette Project started in September 2015 and is a simple idea. To build a free online archive of 20,000 privately owned images of Limerick, Ireland in the 20th Century. Photography began in 1826 and the astonishing technology since then means there are far more pictures being taken every second of every day. Limerick is no exception to this phenomenon. There are hundreds of thousand of images taken by amateur photographers laying idle and gathering dust throughout the city and it is our mission to seek out these images and put them on public display in a permanent online archive available to present and future generations of Limerick people and their descendants long into the future. Using modern social media as a crowdsourcing tool Limerick History Gazette was launched and in a matter of months thousands of Limerick people all over the world joined the project and started to donate images from their own private collections. We reached out to the people of Limerick and they responded in a most amazing way and within months we had gathered in excess of 20,000 archivable images and still growing. It is an exhaustive but worthy process selecting images for our archive as we go through thousands of images to unearth the diamonds but by monitoring and gaging the reaction of our members to each image it has simplified the task and each archived image is therefore selected by our members for inclusion in our archive. However, there is no formula that makes one picture more historically important than another, some images appear because they give us a deeper understanding of how ordinary life was for the people of Limerick in the 20th Century while others reflect the sense of community that existed on the streets of the city north, south, east and west. Many images are also archived because they directly showed the way we lived, celebrated, loved and shared our greatest moments and our darkest days. In the process of building this archive it becomes crystal clear that the photographer had to be present to bear witness to the unfolding events in the hope that history as it happened and the documenting of it with the tangible evidence of a photograph can create an atmosphere where change is possible. Modern history is filled with famous photographs, images that speak to us in many ways. They show us the very best that humanity is capable of as well as the very worst, and everything in between, and the same can be said of the not so famous private home collections of the ordinary people of the world. With camera in hand they too can capture moments in history that defined their families, their neighbourhoods, their city and their world. Whether we know the stories behind these individual images or not they do tell us a different story because they define us and show us from where we came and where we should be going.