Amelia and The Bloods

My friend Amelia Stein is one of Ireland’s best photographers, and I did a portrait of her recently to mark the occasion of her new exhibition “The Bloods” being shown in the newly reopened Butler Gallery in Kilkenny.

With a slight homage to Mapplethorpe

With a slight homage to Mapplethorpe

This is Amelia’s preferred image, which I can understand because she looks like such a boss.

This is Amelia’s preferred image, which I can understand because she looks like such a boss.

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The show is a series of portraits of members of the Defence Forces from the 3 Inf Bn, known as The Bloods, based in James Stephens Barracks, Kilkenny. It’s great work, and you can book (free) tickets here.

There are more of my portraits of artists in this gallery.

Portrait

I use myself to test shots, lights or new films, and sometimes I like the results as photographs. This is one of those.

About Beauty

I first met conceptual artist Dorothy Cross while training at a dive centre in Connemara. I knew and liked her work, which included many pieces inspired by sea creatures or made with found objects from the sea. 

A couple of years later I approached her about making a film and she quite unexpectedly invited me to accompany her on a trip to make work about native shark-callers on New Ireland, a small island off Papua New Guinea that is one of the last true wildernesses left on Earth.

(click image for caption)

It was a tough shoot, not least because a capsized canoe ruined one camera and I had to finish the shoot with Dorothy’s one, which she was also using to make work. Eventually a shark was caught, and after a very moving traditional ceremony it was divided among the villagers on the beach.

(click image for caption)

Kids in Kontu

You can hear a Lyric fm interview I did about the film here.

Confinement Cuisine

Even though it seems like I’ve been really busy all through the lockdown, on some days it felt like the most I achieved was dinner. On some better days, there was also a lunch that worked out well enough. I’ve been cooking way more than usual, and it’s really helped me get through this bizarre, uncertain time. What also helped was having someone to cook for - my housemate Mounia, who came to stay for two weeks in mid-March and has been here ever since. It helps even more that she’s a great cook.

Here are some of the meals we’ve shared over the last three months, including a couple of disasters. She moves back to France tomorrow, and I’m going to miss her.

Click images and hover over for captions, recipes at the bottom of page.

I got vegetable deliveries from Hussey Farm and Clonanny Farm, and meat, fish and poultry from the Corner Butcher. Assassination Custard’s piccalilli is available from The Fumbally and Gailliot et Grey, who make amazing sourdough bread. Most of the more unusual ingredients came from the halal shops on Clanbrassil Street. Photographed in Helen James’s beautiful bowls.

Recipes

MIX TAPES

I've been going through a box of old cassettes, some of which date back to the late Seventies, and am photographing a few of my favourites before I throw them out. I have a tape player with a digital output but the sound quality isn't very good, although it is great to hear snippets of radio announcers in between the songs I taped off the radio. So rather than digitising the contents, I've started an ongoing playlist as a memento, with each cassette in roughly chronological order and the songs in the order that they appear on the tapes.  Some of them immediately transport me back to working late at night in the darkroom, and to other very significant moments in my life, and anyone who ever worked in the Lad Lane or Pembroke Lane studios will find a lot of the music very familiar…

You can listen to the ever-growing playlist via this link.

Radio Radio

Many years ago a friend and I were chatting as we waited for the ferry back from Inis Meáin, when the poet Rita Ann Higgins marched over and without a word of introduction told me "You have such a fabulous voice - you should charge people to do phone sex!"

The time to start doing that hasn’t come, not yet anyway, but I have done bits and pieces of radio over the years, including a stint on Jazz fm (“Dublin’s only black music radio station”) about twenty years ago.

RTE broadcast tower, New Year’s Day, 2020

My father and I have very similar-sounding voices, and have often been mistaken for each other on the phone. When I was very small, he hosted a Sunday show on RTE radio, and while he was on air the rest of the family would drive past RTE on our way to visit my grandparents. I can remember craning my neck to see the top of the radio tower, as I figured that’s where he’d need to be broadcasting from. He went on to have a very distinguished career as a journalist, politician and professor of journalism and was Ireland’s first Press Ombudsman. Here’s a clip of him in 1965, at the very beginning of his career.

Click image for clip

Click image for clip

I’ve been following in his footsteps recently, as I’ve been on the radio a couple of times this week - the first was an interview about shooting Mary Robinson’s election poster, which was broadcast on The History Show. Then I did a voiceover for my friend Amanda Feery’s Swimming Studies show on Dublin Digital Radio.

The last one was my first essay for Sunday Miscellany, called “Shoeboxes”.

"But of course, what really tipped me over the edge were the love letters. Letters signed with love, lots of love, with all my love...."

"But of course, what really tipped me over the edge were the love letters. Letters signed with love, lots of love, with all my love...."

This one was different - a very personal account of going through old shoeboxes full of keepsakes and letters. I was quite nervous as it was broadcast but it seems to have gone down well, so I may even do another one sometime. In the meantime, you can hear two of my father’s Sunday Miscellany contributions here:

Rome, 1965 by John Horgan

I told nobody I was coming by John Horgan

Elvis: Radio Radio

Me at 20

 
Working as a geoelectrical surveyor in the Northern Rif Mountains of Morocco.

Working as a geoelectrical surveyor in the Northern Rif Mountains of Morocco.

Living in Midar with a mix of German squatter punks (like me) and geophysics students (not like me) from the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg. Driving out to work in the desert every day in big Land Cruisers, listening to Pil and the Funboy 3 at top volume. When we arrived in Morocco we didn't have enough cash to bribe the customs officials to let the measuring equipment through, so the first month was spent roaming around Tangier with no money, putting everything on room service. Half-way through the job I got into a relationship with Brigitte Vogelgesang (Brigitte Birdsong - her real name). I was 20, she was 34 - every young man should be so lucky.

Ads

I have mixed feelings about the couple of years I spent directing TV commercials early on in my filmmaking career. You can read more about my misgivings in this piece I wrote for the Gloss magazine, which they gave a self-fulfilling prophesy of a title :

You’ll Never Work In This Town Again.

Earlier today a twitter account posted one of my ads for Barry’s Tea, with a question in the caption:

Legendary copywriter Catherine Donnolly wrote the script, and I think the subtext is pretty clear - the daughter's real father is actually her uncle Jack. You can watch the ad here.

Of all the ads I ever made, the ones I’m still proud of are a series for the National Lottery, showing the beneficiaries of Lottery funding. I still like them because they don’t really feel like ads, and travelling around the country to shoot them was an absolute joy.

Since they were made, my feeling about charity have also changed, and can be best summed up by German stand-up comedian Henning Wehn: “We don’t do charity in Germany. We pay taxes. Charity is a failure of governments’ responsibilities."

100 Views of Contemporary Ireland

I was asked to contribute an image to the 100 Views of Contemporary Ireland exhibition, which marks the first decade of PhotoIreland. The show is running  at the Library Project in Dublin between 12-29 March as part of the St. Patrick’s Day festival. This is my contribution, and prints and postcards of all of the images will be available from the Library Project.

Title: Mary

Location: Inis Meáin

Year: 2014

Jonathan

Jonathan Philbin Bowman ( 1969-2000) photographed for Harpers & Queen magazine, mid 90’s.

My friend Jonathan Philbin Bowman, journalist and broadcaster, who died on this day twenty years ago.

He was such great company - precocious, quick-witted, argumentative, hilarious and utterly original. I’ve never met anyone quite like him, and still miss him a lot.

Check out this beautiful, moving tribute by Roger Doyle, who took an answering machine message Jonathan had left him and set it to music. It’s great to hear him again.

Coat-Hanger Kisses

Annaghmakerrig People

Some of the great people I’ve met in Annaghmakerrig over the years.

Robbie McDonald, who will be leaving next January after ten years as director of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig. The post is currently being advertised

Dancer and choreographer Emma O’Kane

Emma O’Kane in action

Native American playwright Larissa Fasthorse with her husband, sculptor Edd Hogan

Author Diana Souhami

Painter Roisin McGuigan

Sheila Pratschke, the Centre’s second director

There are more photographs of Annaghmakerrig here, as well as some more artists here, writers here and performers here.

Annaghmakerrig

I’m staying at the Tyrone Guthrie centre in Annaghmakerrig, getting some writing done. It’s a fantastic place, which I wrote about for The Dubliner magazine a few years ago - you can read the article here.

I found this couch yesterday on a walk near the centre, and one of the artists sat in for the picture.

The big house

The big house

The Meteor

Dr. Jennifer Carroll MacNeill

I was impressed by barrister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill when I met her a couple of years ago, and later did an author portrait for her award-winning book “The Politics of Judicial Selection in Ireland”.

Since then she’s had a meteoric rise in politics - first she was elected to Dun Laoghaire council last May as a replacement for Maria Bailey, then yesterday she was elected to the Dail on her first attempt, despite the nationwide voting trend against Fine Gael. Although my political beliefs are a considerable distance away from those of her party I wish her the very best in her new position - Fine Gael needs people like her, and hopefully she’ll help them evolve towards a more inclusive ideology.

You can see more of my portraits of leaders in this gallery.

The Whistleblower

Dr. Tom Clonan photographed in Dublin, January 2020.

Tom Clonan is a very interesting character. He’s a former Army officer and whistleblower, who produced a damning report about the mistreatment of women in the Defence Forces. I photographed him recently for his upcoming Senate Election campaign, which he’s undertaking on behalf of children and young people in Ireland with disabilities. You can read more about the campaign here.

There are more of my portraits of leaders here.