In After Magdalene, Dublin-based photographer Ethna Rose O'Regan turns her lens not toward spectacle, but toward absence.
Between 2006 and 2009, she gained rare access to the disused Magdalene Laundry on Sean McDermot Street—once a bastion of clerical control and patriarchal discipline. Though the women were long gone, their absence pulses through every frame, a quiet indictment of Ireland’s not-so-distant history of institutionalized misogyny.
The Magdalene Laundries—ostensibly homes for “fallen women”—functioned more accurately as prisons without due process. Their inmates were young women and girls, often committed by family members or priests, whose only crimes were pregnancy, defiance, or mere misfortune. The last laundry, where O’Regan’s project is centered, was operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity and only ceased operation in 1996. Even then, many of the women remained until they were eventually re-housed two decades later.
O'Regan's images do not dramatize. Instead, they reveal—walls stained with time, corridors emptied of voices, and the smallest traces of former inhabitants: a name tag, a handmade wall hanging, a trinket left on a shelf. These fragments resist the erasure imposed by the Church and the State. They serve as relics of identities buried beneath institutional uniformity, emerging now like archaeological finds in a narrative of systemic abuse.
This project is not merely documentary. It is a gesture of salvage—an attempt to rescue memory from silence, to dignify lives once rendered invisible. Through the stark architecture and lingering domesticity of the space, O’Regan reframes the Magdalene narrative as more than a national disgrace—it becomes a deeply human tragedy. In doing so, she grants the women, long muted by power and piety, a quiet reclamation.
