'You can't grow up and be a photographer at the same time" was a phrase Fergus Bourke used as a mantra. It was a kind of spell he would sprinkle into his conversation. Understood by the photographic community, it was designed to amuse outsiders and create a little distance. His son Cormac said simply at his funeral: "My father was a simple man, full of love and humour."
As a child growing up in Wexford, Bourke was a natural observer. "I watched the tinkers and their children who visited the area and saw the reactions their presence caused. I saw the difference: their sounds, their clothes, their hair colour, their faces all filed away in my memory."
At 15 the power of seeing came to him when he was a student at the Presentation College, Bray, "an awful kip". He would spend hours watching from the gallery of the handball alley the rushing figures as the games were played. "It was a dance unfolding. The confusion of movements shaping into balletic actions," he once said. Closing his eyes for a moment and flashing them open, the frozen memory of the image would sear itself on his retina. He would enjoy the image for a fading moment. He was becoming a human camera.
After leaving school he enjoyed the discovery of a variety of jobs. Once as a stuntman in the film King of Kings - a skill he would sometimes use to surprise people when he would suddenly fall and recover by employing a series of occult tumbles and twists to regain an upright stance.
But he had to wait until his early 20s for his epiphany. It was in Dublin's Coombe area at the house-warming party of sculptor and playwright James McKenna. While all the guests orbited around the frying pan in the kitchen, Fergus toured the empty rooms of the rundown two-storey terraced house. In an empty room upstairs he found a large-format coffee-table book propped up against the wall. The cover was designed by the painter Henri Matisse. He told fellow photographer Tom Lawlor in an interview that the title stopped him on his journey: The Decisive Moment: A collection of 126 black and white photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
"Each picture was a deceptively simple evocation of a street happening or incident captured in a fraction of a second, within the borders of the classical golden mean rectangle, a rigorous organisation of the elements of the subject matter, a magical coming together of the relevant units, freezing a moment of life that as a statement would exist entirely for its own sake. Is such photography an art form? Yes, I say, when it's in the hands of an artist.
"Seeing these pictures revealed to me in an instant that the camera could be an instrument of artistic expression. There had been a photographer trapped inside me for so many years and suddenly this book, in one glorious moment of awakening, opened the door. It was a culture shock, but a very pleasant one, like hearing the music of Chopin for the first time. A good black and white print is like music, it has the power to excite you."
He stood on a "land mine of culture". Empowered, he began to spend many happy hours roaming the cities and towns of Ireland documenting the theatre of the streets. His father, who worked for Dublin Corporation, had taken him as a child on visits to the slums and laneways of Dublin. These visits had a lasting impression on the young Bourke, and it was here that he began to harvest his most famous crop of images. "You must be in love with it. Sean McDermott Street and the quays along the River Liffey with its dominating gasometer became backdrops to my work. And the wonderful children, skinny boys in short trousers and girls in hand-me-downs. 'Hay mister, take me picture!' 'I've no film in the camera'. 'Ah Jesus, take it anyway'."
On the wall of his darkroom is the inscription: it is proportion that beautifies everything. This has been the guiding principle in his life since the first realisation of his creativity as a photographer. On a visit to New York in the early 1970s, Bourke got the opportunity to show his work to Andre Kertesz. "I felt like a young violin student about to spend an afternoon with Yascha Heifetz. Kertesz studied my portfolio of 30 photographs in complete silence and then, passing his hand over them in what looked like a form of blessing said, 'Vonderful, my friend, you see the world vith the eyes of a child'.
"He then shared with me on of the fundamental tenets of the photographers' code: the ability to look at the familiar everyday scene and see it as if you were viewing it for the very first time, with the freshness and innocence of a new discovery." The next day the New York Museum of Modern Art bought seven pieces of Bourke's work for their permanent collection.
While living in Sandymount 1963-1992, he constructed a daylight studio in his garden shed and began exploring the theme of the relationship of couples who had a mutual bond, i.e. mother and son, father and daughter, lovers, sisters.
This body of work is celebrated in his book Kindred 1984-1991. During a visit to this garden studio the late Micheál Mac Liammoir remarked to him: "I like daylight too dear boy, but it doesn't like me."
As resident photographer in the Abbey Theatre 1973-1991 he found the work to be a natural extension to the style of his "social documentary". He could photograph the tenement life of Dublin or the stone walls and cottages of the west of Ireland while sitting comfortably in the front row of an empty auditorium during rehearsals.
Mick Doyle, of the lighting department, recalls finding an eager Bourke climbing into the lighting rig to capture a new angle.
And when Garry Hynes, who was directing a Druid production which she had written, instructed Bourke how to take a shot he turned to Mick and growled "who's yer wan".
In the early 1990s he moved west from Dublin to photograph the ever-changing landscapes of Connemara producing stunning images of the countryside hanging from amazing skies. Studying and capturing the light before storm and after rain.
Sometimes using infra-red film to produce haunting and dreamlike effects. His Connemara Moon presented us with a newly found location and the planet seeming out of its orbit in a Paul Henry sky. In the spring of last year he was emerging from his "season for sleeping". "Trees don't look good in winter," he remarked.
"Connemara is now my studio and the trademark in my landscapes is the sky." To reach his darkroom, which was located behind his house in a small shed, he passed the trees he had planted in the garden. "Elder, aspen, chestnut, oak, ash, birch, palm, beech and gingko . . ."
Bourke is survived by his wife Maureen, children, Bronwyn, Cormac, Erik and Dan.
Fergus Bourke: born July 31st, 1934; died October 8th, 2004.