Winter Papers 3
Limerick street photographs selected for Ireland’s annual arts anthology, Winter Papers.
One day, I got an unexpected message from the Irish writer Kevin Barry. He asked if I would like to contribute a selection of my photographs of Limerick City to his Winter Papers publication. This beautifully produced annual arts anthology is edited by him and his wife, Olivia Smith. I had admired it and owned the previous two copies, which made this opportunity particularly exciting.
The photographs featured in this publication were originally captured around 1990 and then remained unseen as the negatives sat in a folder for over 25 years. When my website was created, I began going through my archive and digitising my work. Revisiting my old negatives was such an enjoyable experience, as I had never developed any prints at the time. Photography was a small part of my printmaking course in Limerick. I fell in love with it, but we had limited resources and the darkroom was coveted by many.
Exhibit A in Dublin did a wonderful job scanning the negatives and the reproductions in the book turned out perfectly.
Winter Papers 3 launch on RTE 1 Arena with Sean Rocks
Analogue City
Kevin Barry wrote short prose in response to my photographs which reflected on life in Limerick in the early 1990s calling the collection 'Tales from the Analogue City'.
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.”
Brian Dillon, Irish Times
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.
Hilary A White, Sunday Independent