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.
Jim Butler of Inspirational Arts is a master printer, ally to legions of artists and photographers and an all-around great guy.
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 MoreWhen 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:
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.
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.
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.
A portrait of Mark Lord, Dublin, March 2020.
Jonathan Philbin Bowman ( 1969-2000) photographed for Harpers & Queen magazine, mid 90’s.
My friend Jonathan Philbin Bowman, journalist and broadcaster, who died on this day twenty years ago.
He was such great company - precocious, quick-witted, argumentative, hilarious and utterly original. I’ve never met anyone quite like him, and still miss him a lot.
Check out this beautiful, moving tribute by Roger Doyle, who took an answering machine message Jonathan had left him and set it to music. It’s great to hear him again.
Some of the great people I’ve met in Annaghmakerrig over the years.
Robbie McDonald, who will be leaving next January after ten years as director of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig. The post is currently being advertised
Dancer and choreographer Emma O’Kane
Emma O’Kane in action
Native American playwright Larissa Fasthorse with her husband, sculptor Edd Hogan
Author Diana Souhami
Painter Roisin McGuigan
Sheila Pratschke, the Centre’s second director
