Winter Papers
Limerick street photographs selected for Ireland’s annual arts anthology, Winter Papers.
I was delighted to be invited by the award-winning Irish writer Kevin Barry to contribute a selection of my Limerick photographs to Winter Papers. This beautifully produced annual arts anthology, edited by Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith, is one I have long admired, making the opportunity particularly meaningful.
The photographs featured in this publication were originally captured over twenty-five years ago and remained unseen, preserved as negatives in my archive. Revisiting them has been a powerful experience, reconnecting me with my time as an art student in the late 1980s in Limerick City.
I am proud to see these images brought to life in such a considered and elegant context.
Winter Papers 3 launch on RTE 1 Arena with Sean Rocks
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
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.