Michael by me, me by Michael

Michael Snoek and his wife Dorothee have been family friends since I was a small boy. He was working as a geophysicist in Hamburg when I passed through as a teenage runaway, and he was kind enough to get me a life-changing job with the Max Planck Institut that took me off to live and work in Greece and Morocco as a geo-electrical surveyor. Some years later they moved to Ireland and Michael became very involved with photography and was one of the founders of the Kamera 8 gallery in Wexford. He’s just launched his fantastic new site, link here.

Much like myself, Michael is not half as stern as he sometimes seems in photographs.

Michael Snoek, photographed at home in Wexford, July 2020.

I think I was about nine when Michael took this picture of me.

You can see more of my portraits of friends and family 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.)

The Ma and MacWeeney

Alen MacWeeney was my mother’s first boyfriend, but the relationship didn’t last after he moved to New York to become Richard Avedon’s assistant. He went on to have a stellar career as a photographer there, often coming back to Ireland to shoot a long-term project on the travelling community. I bought one of his prints of two traveller kids with the proceeds from the first script I ever sold, and it’s up in pride of place on the living room wall.

Alen MacWeeney photographed in Dublin, April 2019.

My mother Sara, aged 18, photographed by Alen. He added the image of himself looking at her and sent it from New York.

It was great to catch up with him when I was back in Dublin last week. He told me about the new biography of Avedon, saying “it reads like a thriller”. I’m halfway through its 700 pages, and he’s not wrong.

You can see some of my other pictures of artists in this gallery.

HCB

“You just have to live and life will give you pictures” - Henri Cartier-Bresson.