Check out these amazing historic images as they come to life thanks to a unique animation project
From a market day in Limerick city in 1904 to children outside a school in Co Monaghan in 1905, a series of historic Irish images have been brought back to life as part of a unique animation project.
Westport artist Matt Loughrey has reanimated the scenes that depict Irish life from more than a century ago.
The images, taken in Ireland from 1870 to 1910, were sourced from files at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, USA.
The stereoviews depict long lost scenes in every day Irish life.
They are created by placing images taken a few inches apart together to create the perception of depth.
Popular in Victorian times, they would be viewed through a stereoscope.
Here, that perception has been recreated through an animation that creates a moving 3D image.
Among the highlights are a rare shot of a Cork street in 1901 and a boy at Ballynahinch lake in Co Galway:
There are full-length portraits taken at the Gap of Dunloe, Killarney in the 1870s and portraits of a Lough Gill boatman from 1901, a man from Denbeigh in 1904 and some 'Galway lads' in 1900:
The pictures also depict images of the market at Eyre Square in Galway in 1905, lace makers in Cashel in 1900 and a market day in Limerick in 1904, as well as a number of family and individual portraits:
"The idea came from another project that has been in place for some time now, namely a revisiting of Civil War America and a series of parallaxes I discovered," Mr Loughrey said.
"They were published in the US recently and it made sense to source some examples closer to home."
Luckily, it turned out that there were dozen of images on file at the Library of Congress in the US.
Many were quite similar and could easily be mistaken for duplicates, Mr Loughrey added.
"On close inspection, there were minor differences between some of the images and it was apparent that they too were parallaxes," he said.
"Collecting them is the easy part, anchoring them digitally and reanimating the scenes is the involved part.
"A couple of months later a small collection was amassed, it's enough to bring a new sense of relatability to the scenes and people in the images, some of which are quite arresting."
Ordinarily, Mr Loughrey's work focuses on colourising historic photography and he has been working on the project for four years. In 2017, it was featured in National Geographic.
"It was immediately after this that museums and libraries the world over began to get in touch about revisiting their collections to see what might be possible," he said.
"Ireland in motion is a subproject and too will be realized in colour."
See more of Matt Loughrey's work on My Colourful Past (@my_colourful_past) on Instagram.
