It's a fair bet that many schoolchildren who go on to work within the media or to become creative artists themselves, such as photographer Perry Ogden, become involved with school magazines. It's also a fair bet that few school magazines carry full-page ads for Sothebys on the back. Ogden, who was raised in Shropshire and London, attended Eton. "When I was 17, I got involved with a one-off school magazine," he relates in his Capel Street studio, which has been his base for the last few years. He only recently acquired the adjoining building, and the place is in a state of ordered chaos, with newly-knocked through walls and plastic sheeting covering floors and furniture.
Ogden goes off to search through the dusty shelves for Lipstick the public-school publication he coedited in 1979, and which inspired him to want to work as a photographer. Leafing through it, even 20 years after publication, it's clear Lipstick was an extraordinary venture by any standards.
Apart from ads such as the one from Sothebys, there are portraits and interviews with Andy Warhol, Diana Vreeland - the editor of American Vogue - and David Bailey. This is material you would expect to come across in back-issues of Rolling Stone or Vogue. In addition to being co-editor, Ogden also took the photographs and wrote some of the interviews. How did he manage to get hold of these people, at the age of 17?
"I knew Bailey through my aunt. I rang up some of the others." At the time Ogden's mother, Moira Keenan, edited the women's page at the London Times, so those contacts didn't go astray either. "Photography looked kind of glamorous at that time," Ogden says.
He took the Lipstick pictures with an Olympus OM1 camera. "Diana Vreeland was an extraordinary woman; the grand old dame of fashion. I thrived on that meeting with her for years. Warhol didn't have a lot to say. He was very monosyllabic." And the girl on the front cover of the magazine wearing Biba make-up and an Eton uniform, who is she? "My then girlfriend." Two years after leaving school, having spent time as an assistant to Tony Magee, a fashion photographer in London, Ogden set up on his own. He worked in London and New York, photographing fashion pages for the Sunday Times and for Guess? jeans in the US. What does he define as a good fashion picture? "It's about capturing a spirit. I like to think that in my pictures, people look as if they've dressed themselves, so they don't look awkward or uncomfortable."
He came to Ireland for the first time in 1983. "I stayed in Leixlip with the Guinnesses. After that, I came back and did various stories. I did one on Molly Keane for Harpers and Queen. And one for The Face on joyriding." While in Ireland, Ogden fell in love. From the relationship came a daughter, Violet, who is now 11. "But the relationship broke up," he explains, furrowing his brow and looking across at the raw plaster of the knocked-through walls.
Because of his personal commitments with Ireland, Ogden kept coming backwards and forwards from Paris and Britain, eventually setting up the Capel Street studio. In 1994, a friend brought him to Smithfield Market, to the monthly horse fair, where many of the buyers are teenagers from Dublin suburbs.
"We used to go to this farm near Stirling in Scotland when we were children - 10, 11, 12, that sort of age. I learned to ride there. And then I wanted my my own pony. But of course, it was impossible, because we lived in London. At that time, I remember W. H. Smith running a Win-A-Pony competition. I entered several times.
"I'm sure that early wish for a pony had something to do with my interest in Dublin's pony kids. And the mixture of cultures. The global culture of Nike and Adidas sportswear, which all the kids were wearing, meeting this local culture of keeping ponies and horses in your back garden."
Ogden started photographing children and teenagers with their ponies, at Smithfield. One result was an exhibition in 1997 at the market itself, which was opened by Mary Robinson. The other is Pony Kids, a book of photographs of the children with their steeds. The book launch on February 10th is immediately followed by the opening of an exhibition of the same name at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin.
"I had quite a job to go and find these kids again last year, because I wanted to put their voices to be heard. I went out in the car with bundles of laser copies and wound down the window and kept asking kids wherever I went, `Do you know who these people are?' "
Despite initial silences in the suspicion that he was either a garda or someone coming to take their horses away, Ogden found most of those he had originally photographed, and interviewed them. Their words - funny, stark, honest - are interspersed with the photographs.
So did Perry Ogden ever have his own pony as he so wanted? "No, but my daughter does. And she rides him nearly every day," he says. His smile is large and delighted.
Pony Kids, with an introduction by Fintan O'Toole, is published on February 10th by Jonathan Cape, price £20 in UK. Perry Ogden's exhibition opens at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art on February 11th