Culture Night 2021

I have two offerings for Culture Night this year : A large-scale, one-off print of this image is for sale in the ÍOVA 2nd Annual Photography Exhibition: 6pm Friday 17th Sept 39/40 Arran Quay, till Sunday the 19th September.

I am also delighted to have edited a specially commissioned short film for Decade of Centenaries 1921-2021, made by Susan Mannion, Matthew Gammon and Rory Pierce. You can see it here.

The film can also be viewed at 22 locations along the River Shannon in County Roscommon on Culture night by using a QR code. Information is on the Culture Night website for Roscommon.

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Bulloch on Lennox and Synge

Good to see my Bulloch Harbour image up on the wall beside Red & Grey design on the corner of Lennox Street and Synge Lane, just in time for the next heatwave. It's part of a series, with a new image going up every week.

Holding

I did some publicity shots for “Holding”, a new ITV drama starring Conleth Hill and Siobhan McSweeney, directed by Kathy Burke.

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IVANA

 

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.

No T Like a Joe T

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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.

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The words making up the image spell “ No show like a Joe show”

The words making up the image spell “ No show like a Joe show”

Little 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.

LOUISAHHH!!!

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.

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

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

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.