Best in Showcase: work from emerging Irish photographers

Outdoor ironing, floating families and unwitting passers-by - photographers shortlisted for the Gallery of Photography Artist's Award explain what's behind their work

1 SABINA MACMAHON

St Veronica

“My work explores the space that exists between fact and fiction and exploits the impulse that leads us to believe photographs, texts and objects communicate absolute truths. This new body of work focuses on St Veronica, the patron saint of photography, a title bestowed upon her as a reward for her early experimentation fixing sun pictures on light-sensitive supports. It brings together a series of photographs taken by her and an early tailboard camera believed to have been developed by her in Paris. The photographs in this exhibition include an apparition of the Holy Family on the patio of their home in Nazareth; Christ as a young man walking on water; and the Tree of the True Cross at Loughlinstown, Co Dublin.”

2 KIRSTY O’KEEFFE

Something Else to Do But Hang Around in Suburbia

“This is a series of images based on the lives of people who live in Ireland’s suburban areas. The recent prosperity of the country is reflected in the proliferation of new housing developments, where apartment blocks and housing estates have emerged at an unprecedented rate and the regeneration of older and more established suburban areas has become widespread.”

3 LIAM MURPHY

Baggot Street Bridge

“Baggot Street Bridge is a long-term photographic project that attempts to capture private emotions in a public setting. It comprises a series of portraits of people caught in transit across Baggot Street Bridge in Dublin. Shot from the four bases of the structure, subjects are seen in elevation on the crest of the bridge. The portraits are uncontrived and the subjects are, to the greatest degree possible, unwitting.”

4 PATRICK HOGAN

Solitary, Half Mad

“Over the past year I have been working on a series of photographic short stories. Each story will be intertwined and put together in book format. This is the first of these stories, and is loosely concerned with isolation and the capacity to be alone. Working in Ireland, this project is beginning to absorb some of my own political feelings of isolation, confusion and unease.”

5 IVOR PRICKETT

Gali: Abkhazia’s frontier with Georgia

“The Gali district of Abkhazia, on the border with Georgia proper, is home to the only remaining Mingrelian Georgian people in Abkhazia. The region feels like a buffer zone between the two sides. The Mingrelians feel abandoned in the conflict, living on the front line of a dispute that has yet to be fully resolved. For now they get on with life, happy because they have returned to their homeland but sad because it will never be the same again. This body of work depicts the everyday routines people living in extraordinary circumstances still have to go through in order to survive.”

6 FRANCIS O’RIORDAN

The Black Valley

“This work is about light and how it represents our modern existence. In 1979 the Black Valley, between Macgillycuddy’s Reeks and Killarney National Park, was the last community in mainland Ireland to be connected to the national electrical grid. I explore the dependence people have on the artificial nature of technology and how we find ourselves always being lured away from nature to the comfort of technology to make our existence seem easier.”

7 PATRICK FITZPATRICK

Nature and Memory

“I have begun to explore nature and memory through photography’s capacity to capture the ephemeral, its ability, as Patrick Kavanagh put it, ‘to snatch out of time the passionate transitory’ and to show ‘the magical strangeness of ordinary things’ in photographs.”

8 MICHELLE HORRIGAN

Aughinish Alumina factory, Limerick

“My work interrogates notions of environment and landscape. I am researching a new artwork investigating environmental concerns surrounding the Aughinish Alumina factory (the largest industrial complex in Ireland). It narrates a debate surrounding deformed agricultural livestock, toxic deposits in the soil and harmful emissions.”

Showcase is at the Gallery of Photography until January 30th; galleryof photography.ie