The great New York portrait photographer Arnold Newman once said: "The portrait is a form of biography. Its purpose is to inform now and to record for history." Long an inspiration for photographers around the world, his portraits - always creative but never repetitive - have set the standard for the profession.
One day this year I was asked to illustrate an interview by Aidan Dunne, the Irish Timesart critic, with Robert Ballagh, who had a retrospective planned for the Royal Hibernian Academy.
I had held Ballagh in high regard from his early pop-art days, and I also admired his later style of heightened realism. The challenge was to avoid yet another image of an artist in front of an easel with a work in progress. Ballagh's studio, in Arbour Hill, did not lack visual stimuli on the day of our visit. The eventual photograph attempts to link the artist to his past in an imaginative way. It features a model of the exhibition space for his retrospective, with tiny reproductions of his past works on the walls.
Mindful of the fact that Ballagh is also a superb photographer - his Red Cow is a classic - and still works on film, with his Rolleiflex, I pushed on nervously to make my own record. I hope it worked.