The Irish writer Eilis Dillon wrote in The Bitter Glass, that the photographs sent home by emigrants, were small compensation for their loss: “It was dim comfort indeed to receive after a while unnatural photographs of strange young people with alien faces, dressed in peculiar American clothes. Fathers and brothers set to work to make large fret-work frames for, so that they could take their place on the mantelshelf and gradually fade into ghosts from the heat and the acid turf dust continually drifting over them.”