Fintan O’Toole, photographed at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris in June 2019
Congratulations to Fintan O'Toole, who has just won the An Post Irish Book of the Year 2021 for his We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958.
Read MoreTwo of my portraits of Mary Robinson, who became the first woman to be elected President of Ireland on this day in 1990.
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I had fun doing this interview with the Medical Independent.
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
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...."
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:
I told nobody I was coming by John Horgan
When I first met the wonderful Helen Sloan, she told me that all photographers are creeps. I was a bit taken aback, but she’s right - photographers want to see without being seen, to capture things that wouldn’t necessarily happen if people were aware that we’re there, quietly shooting away. Just as when this sleeping man caught my eye at Le 104 the other day, though I was quickly outcreeped by his girlfriend Agathe, who snuck in for a close-up. She’s also a photographer, of course.
I got some concerned calls from friends and family in Ireland when they saw I was out taking photographs at the Gilet Jaunes protests. I assured them I was fine, having learned a valuable life lesson during my first ever riot*.
The current protests also remind me of attending a much quieter riot during the winter of 2011 in New York.
And of going to the May Day riots in Berlin, which turned out to be a very civilised affair.
*I was seventeen and had just started taking photographs when I went to my first riot, which kicked off during a squatter’s protest in Nørrebro, Copenhagen. Unfortunately I didn’t get any good pictures - after a few hours hanging around in case something happened, when it actually did I was far too busy running down a narrow city street as fast as I could from a terrifying wall of charging police, equipped with barking dogs and waving long mahogany batons. I didn’t have a press card, but even if I had it would have made absolutely no difference - they were determined to pacify everyone on the street with extreme force, no matter who they were. So my top riot tip is this: in a riot, stay as far away as possible from the people who are most likely to hurt you, and those people are probably the police.
My book of New York photos is available online. Limited-edition prints from the book are available for purchase at The Copper House Gallery in Dublin. You can see a piece I did on New York for Narratively here.
Mathias Zwick does great photographs of the Gilet Jaunes protests in Paris, and there’s a country-wide live feed here.
…well, it was when I took these photographs during Act VIII. There was an escalation of violence last week, but so far today’s protests (Act IXX) have been a lot calmer. A lot of people here feel it’s time to give it a rest, and XX is such a nice round number…
