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”
We shot the bar image in Les Pipos, where Gainsbourg used to sing before he was famous.
Read MoreAfter 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.
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 MoreThese 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:
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.
A series of portraits commissioned by the Gate Theatre, Dublin. I very much hope we can return to theatres next year.
You can see more of my portraits here.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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 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.
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 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.)
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.
I use myself to test shots, lights or new films, and sometimes I like the results as photographs. This is one of those.
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.
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.
Amelia Stein, photographer, Portobello.
My old friend Amelia Stein dropped over yesterday. It was great to see her.
I really like this one.
Amelia offered to cut my hair - probably should have taken her up on it.
