I did some publicity shots for “Holding”, a new ITV drama starring Conleth Hill and Siobhan McSweeney, directed by Kathy Burke.
Read MoreIVANA
My photograph of Ivana Bacik on the campaign trail.
I’ve just voted for Ivana Bacik in the Dublin Bay South by-election, and if you have a vote in the constituency please use it to help elect her. She’s a courageous, principled and progressive politician, and we need more people like her in the Dáil.
The Master
Jim Butler of Inspirational Arts is a master printer, ally to legions of artists and photographers and an all-around great guy.
No T Like a Joe T
These are my portraits of Joe Dolan from the 90's, and comedian Justine Stafford has just made one into a t-shirt with all proceeds going to the Irish Hospice Foundation. You can get one here.
The words making up the image spell “ No show like a Joe show”
Crow on a Fence*
We shot the bar image in Les Pipos, where Gainsbourg used to sing before he was famous.
Read MoreLittle Italy
After watching the Sopranos again, I've started listening to the "Our Thing" podcast, in which real-life gangster Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano tells stories about being underboss to John Gotti, head of the Gambino crime family in New York. In the first episode he describes the FBI raid on the Ravenite Club in Little Italy that brought Gotti's career to an end. There was something about the place that sounded familiar, so I looked up the address. Turns out it was in the same building on Mulberry Street where I spent a winter a couple of years ago.
This was the view out the window.
You can see more about my winter in New York here.
Emma
When you’re making a portrait of someone, it helps to fall in love with them a little. It was very easy indeed to fall in love with Emma.
Read MoreLOUISAHHH!!!
These are my portraits of LOUISAHHH!!!, the queen of French industrial techno. She's just announced her first album, The Practice of Freedom, which is available to pre-order here:
Happy New Year...
I’d only just bought the mug and was walking around the corner when the bag holding it tipped against a bollard, breaking the handle off. I brought it home and fixed it. It broke again, in a different place, and I fixed it again, and again. It’s been broken in 12 different places, and it still works.
Happy New Year.
Gate Theatre Portraits
A series of portraits commissioned by the Gate Theatre, Dublin. I very much hope we can return to theatres next year.
Featured
You can see more of my portraits here.
One Hundred Profile Pictures
You can see a full sized version of this image here.
This is a selection of my portraits that people have used as their profile pictures. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to have one done or to give one as a gift.
Goodbye to Cara Magazine
It’s sad to see that Aer Lingus’s inflight magazine Cara won’t be published any longer - it was a great magazine to shoot for, and they won several well-deserved awards for best use of photography. It was always a treat to travel on an Aer Lingus flight and see other passengers looking through my photographs. Here is a selection of work I’ve done for them over the years - hover over images for captions. You can see more of my travel features here.
Cecilia Danell
Painter Cecilia Danell, photographed at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris.
Congratulations to Cecilia Danell, who has been awarded the ESB Keating Award and Silver Medal for an Outstanding Art Work at this year’s RHA Annual exhibition. She’s also shortlisted for the RCSI Art Award, which will be announced in December. This image is an out-take from a portrait I was commissioned to make by the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, which will be part of a semi-permanent exhibition of 18 portraits of artists-in-residence there from later this month. I’m really looking forward to seeing them up on the walls.
CECILIA DANELL - IN THE BIRCH PLANTATION. Oil and acrylics on canvas, 95 x 130 cm
You can see more of my portraits of artists in this gallery .
Photographing Fungie
Fungie the dolphin, photographed in 2015.
I’ve been commissioned to photograph portraits of many different subjects over the years, but he was my first cetacean. It was for a book of portraits that had been commissioned by a client in Dingle, and she wanted one of him as he was part of the reason she’d moved there nearly thirty years ago. He could be a little frisky and his love of bellyflopping beside small boats had ruined a fair few cameras, so I taped up my new one in a plastic Supervalu bag and brought an old, expendable one as back up. We didn’t get splashed, I got the shot and it ended up on the cover of the book, which by the end had expanded from an initial 50 portraits to 223, shot all over the world.
You can see some of my favourite shots from the book here.
There’s a terrific RTE news report about Fungie here, which uses footage from Tor Cotton’s documentary “The Dolphin’s Gift”
Kate, Mahdi and Tiger, Dingle.
The Genius
I’m delighted to see that my friend Larissa Fasthorse has just been named a MacArthur Fellow, an award known as the “genius grant” to creatives. She’s a Native American playwright and former ballet dancer, who I met a few years ago in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig. It couldn’t happen to a nicer person.
Larissa Fasthorse with her husband, sculptor Edd Hogan
You can see more of my portraits of writers in this gallery.
Marina De Van
Marina de Van is a very interesting French film director, screenwriter, novelist and actor. She was a great subject to shoot, making it a challenge to pick just one image - I did eventually, and it’s in the “Artists” gallery.
Her new site has just been launched, and offers acting coaching and hypnosis in Paris.
I set a Bait for the Unknown
Cecilia Danell photographed in the Centre Culturel Irlandais, January 2020.
This my portrait of painter Cecilia Danell, taken earlier this year when she was an artist-in-residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. Her show “I set a Bait for the Unknown” has just opened in the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, and is very much worth a look.
You can see more of my portraits of artists here.
Hugh X 5
Hugh O’Conor, photographed in my kitchen.
Hugh O’Conor is a quintuple threat. As well as being one of the best actors of his generation, he’s an extravagantly talented director, screenwriter and photographer, and he’s the nicest man in the Irish film industry. He defies categorisation, which makes it all the more difficult to decide which gallery on the site to put his portrait into…
(You can see the gallery he went into here.)
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
This is Amelia’s preferred image, which I can understand because she looks like such a boss.
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.