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Experiment E855 was carried out at the AGS at Brookhaven National Laboratory to study soft photon production near center of mass rapidity Y{sub cm} {approximately} 0 in proton-nucleus collisions at 10 at 18 GeV/c. This was the first dedicated experiment to study this phenomenon at these lower energies. It is important to note that the related process of low mass dilepton pair production has been studied extensively at these energies and an excess signal of dileptons above known hadronic backgrounds has been firmly established. E855 was designed to measure photon production from P{sub t} {approximately} 5 MeV/c up to several GeV/c. A search will be made for an excess of soft photons in the P{sub t} region below the Jacobian peak from {pi}{sup 0} decays, above that which is expected from hadronic bremsstrahlung. Any observed signal will be correlated with the total charged multiplicity in the event in order to determine its production mechanism. This correlation can be used to distinguish purely hadronic sources of soft photons, such as mesons decays and bremsstrahlung, which vary linearly with the charged multiplicity, and a thermal source of soft photons which would exhibit a quadratic dependence on the charged multiplicity. In addition, E855 will measure low energy photons from nuclear decays which can be a background for measuring soft photons near Y{sub cm} {approximately} 0. These photons are also interesting from a nuclear physics point of view, since the spectrum of photons from nuclei excited by incident high energy protons gives a measure of the temperature of the excited nucleus and the amount of excitation energy which can be transferred to a nucleus in a high energy proton collision.