I’M originally from Portmarnock. It was such an idyllic place to grow up in, our house was really close to the beach.
I live in midtown Manhattan now. After I left school, I studied photography at Dublin Institute of Technology and I got a part-time job in the darkroom at the Sunday Tribune newspaper. I was processing and printing pictures and going out on assignments with the photographers. Then I got a job in a local newspaper in Dublin and started to freelance from there. I went on my first overseas assignment to Sierra Leone in 1999 during the civil war. It was a real baptism of fire.
The most important skills in my job are empathy and then patience. Some photographs take a long time to happen.
It’s a very different career today than when I started so I would encourage young people to be aware that it’s unlikely you will ever get rich or famous. However, it’s also unlikely that you will ever be bored or be unfulfilled. If that sounds okay, then do it.
The best part of my job is that every day is different and I get to meet people that I would never otherwise meet because I have a camera. The downside is the unpredictability of never knowing where the next paycheck is coming from.
I’ve only been in New York for a year and even then, I have been back and forth to Ireland every couple of months because of the In Plain Sight exhibition and other projects so I haven’t had a chance to miss Dublin yet. I don’t really consider myself a New Yorker yet either, I’m drifting somewhere in the mid-Atlantic at the moment but the best part of New York is that the streets are a theatre filled with life’s characters, the city is so rich with art and culture and also the super camera stores are just a 15-minute walk away where I can pick up anything I need for a shoot.
If I could choose someone alive or dead to photograph, I imagine Jesus would have made a great subject for a portrait but sticking with the attainable, I’d really like to photograph Daniel Day Lewis. His face just gets more interesting as he gets older and he is probably the world’s greatest living actor.
Right now, I’m working on a project for the centenary of 1916. It will be an exhibition of 100 portraits and will be shown in New York next year. I’m also hoping it will be made into a book. It will feature a host of people who have made a significant contribution to Ireland during the first one hundred years since the Easter Rising.
1. This is a picture from the first photo story that I ever did in 1994 when I was in college. It is of two sisters in Fatima Manisons, a working class flat complex in Dublin. The girls’ mother was a heroin addict and they were neglected quite a bit. I am still in touch with them and their mum and they have done really great, they are both working and the three of them are still living together in the same house. Their mother has been clean for over a decade and they are a tight-knit family. The girls never tried drugs.
2. I passed this house several times while driving thought the midlands but didn’t stop until this particular day when I saw the two horses outside. The horse in front kept coming towards me and eventually caught up and tried to eat the camera strap, he thought I had food. The image was used in publications all over the world and became a symbol of the economic crash in Ireland.
3. I made this image in 2010 in the village of Addei, Ethiopia. It’s 3,500 meters above sea level so is very mountainous. The scene looks very biblical and beautiful and the agricultural tradition of threshing using donkeys hasn’t changed for centuries but the story behind it belies its beauty. The girl, Zinet and her father Yusef are doing things together to try and heal following an incident that shattered the family when Yusef sold his daughter into marriage months earlier. They were a very poor family and he really thought it was the right thing to do. The assignment was commissioned by the NGO Concern who invited three Irish female photographers to travel to countries where they work and focus on women’s issues in those countries. The exhibition, shown at the Gallery of Photography in 2010 was called the Women of Concern.
4. This is Dave Dineen from Cork outside the now derelict house in a city suburb where he grew up. His story was featured in my recent exhibition In Plain Sight, about child sexual abuse in Ireland which was shown in Dublin and Cork. He is standing at the gate of the house that he was abused in by his mother and his brother. He is wearing a superman t-shirt which I think is symbolic of his strength to overcome the dreadful childhood experiences. You can see the child in him in the way he is standing holding on to the gate.
