Winter Papers
Limerick street photographs selected for Ireland’s annual arts anthology, Winter Papers.
I was thrilled to be contacted by the award winning Irish writer, Kevin Barry with a request to publish some of my Limerick photographs in his publication Winter Papers 3. This is such a beautiful publication and I was already a fan of this annual arts anthology which is edited by Kevin Barry and his wife Olivia Smith. I am so proud to have my photographs reproduced so beautifully in this book. The negatives were hidden away in a folder for over twenty five years and they bring me back to a very important time in my life going to art school in the late 80s in the wonderous Limerick which I know consider a home.
Bridging that world and the rest of the content in Winter Papers 3 is Barry himself, who diaries his good-old-bad-old days as a baby journalist in Limerick alongside Joanne Betty Conlon's slightly eerie black and white photos of the city taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is worth it alone for Barry's anecdote about getting a friendly lift home from the gardai while hallucinating, but the almost incidental feeling of the words alongside the imagery does have a seismic quality.
Arena had a special programme to mark the publication of the annual arts anthology 'Winter Papers, Volume 3', with Kevin Barry, Sarah Baume, Paul Lynch, Jessica Traynor and Mary Morrissy (published by Curlew Editions). Kevin Barry also discussed my photographs and the stories he wrote about Limerick at that time.
In response to photographs of Limerick in the 1980s and 1990s by Joanne Betty Conlon, Barry contributes a knotty, wry piece about the city: “The place was never entirely right in itself.”
Read the review in the Irish Times: Winter Papers 3: a deluxe but adventurous anthology