'It's the light' – American photographer on why he keeps coming to Mayo

Mayo is the choice number one for an American photographer.

Glen McClure from Norfolk, Virginia keeps coming back to the West of Ireland, especially Mayo, and its outpost Achill island have a special place in his heart. It wasn't family ties that brought McClure to these shores though.

The famous hobbit Bilbo Baggins from Lord of the rings is quoted: 'Going out your door, you step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off.' Certainly Glen McClure, a photographer from Norfolk, Virginia in the United States, did not know where he would end up, when he went on the first international trip with his wife in 1990. They went to Scotland, and stayed at a B&B in Edinburgh.

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"And I'll never forget the man who was the innkeeper. He says, oh, you're a photographer,” McClure explains, speaking to The Mayo News: “The innkeeper said, have you ever gone to the west of Ireland? It's beautiful. So I wrote it on my hand, the west of Ireland. This is before the internet. So when I get back home, I think, I don't know anything about the west of Ireland. I picked up the phone and I figured out where the number was for the Irish tourist board in the US.”

And the rest is history as they say. Glen McClure makes a few phone calls and arranges a photography tour and since he first set foot on Ireland in 1994 he just can't get enough of the wild landscape. And particularly county Mayo has captured his imagination. He keeps coming back almost every year.

In 2020, McClure published a photo book, called 'Apprentice to light: The West of Ireland'. “It's the light”, McClure explains the allure: “The reason I keep going back, number one, it's beautiful. I can go to the same places over and over again because they're always different. The weather's always changed. You find a location and you might think, you know what, I'm going to come back tomorrow when the light's better. But it's never the same twice. I love that.”

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Glen always has a dry rag in his coat pocket so he can wipe the camera lens off and keep shooting. For all his enthusiasm about Ireland right now, McClure is not aware of any direct ancestry in his family: “The most I know about my whole history, I guess my parents weren't interested. But I was up with a buddy in Donegal at some point, and there was a farmer out in a field. And I said, 'I'm going to go see if I can do a portrait of that guy'. So I went over, and I introduced myself. And he goes, 'Oh, you're a McClure. Your people came from Scotland, and they went to Belfast'. I said: 'They did? That's the most I've ever heard.'

Next St Patrick's Day in a month's time, McClure will be in Mayo again, to take photos of the Dooagh pipe band in Achill and accompany their march. He has been doing that for many years and even won an award for the portrait of a piper.

“What I love about Ireland,” Glen says, “when you're out on these beaches and you can kind of look off in the distance and you go: Here it comes. You can see the rain. It's coming right at you.”

One story illustrates his point. He was at Old Head Beach, with Croagh Patrick behind him. “And comes a hailstorm. And it was a monster hailstorm. There was nowhere to run. So I'm like, well, I'm going to shoot hail. And I just held my camera up, got a picture I just love. It's hail coming down like these white streaks with Croagh Patrick in the background. You can't plan that kind of stuff. You just got to go with it.”

Visit Glen McClure's website to view more of his work.

The Dooagh pipe band photographed by Glen McClure on St Patrick's Day

Dugort, Achill, by Glen McClure