Tony O’Shea - Artist in residence
Tony O’Shea is one of Ireland’s most acclaimed photographers, he has worked as an independent photographer for more than 40 years and has documented many key events in Ireland’s social and political history. In 2017 O’Shea began an artist residency in Photo Museum Ireland (formerly Gallery of Photography Ireland). During his residency, he worked closely with Digital Arts Manager Daniel Scully to digitise his entire archive containing thousands of negatives. A major outcome of his residency will be an artist retrospective The Light of Day rescheduled for exhibition in the museum in December 2022. The exhibition (postponed due to COVID) is accompanied by a publication spanning four decades, co-published by RRB Books and Photo Museum Ireland, was launched in the gallery in 2020. His work has received many accolades and is represented in the museum collection.
"Tony O’Shea is interested in the moment where the ritual and the casual face each other in the complex light that comes from Irish skies. He likes gatherings and public spaces. And he is watching for the second when, even if his subjects are performing, a guard has been let down, and the camera becomes an uneasy, tentative, hesitant window into the soul. He seeks images of individual loneliness and isolation, figures in a state of reverie and contemplation, or figures in a state of excitement."
"A retrospective book of his life’s work to date, The Light of Day, is full of natural wonders and human struggles that surface from the borderlands during the Troubles and in the rituals and recreation of his city. Each image wants to be a short story."- The Irish Times, 2020
"Strange animal spirits are everywhere apparent in his pictures: raggedy boys stand on horseback on city streets, hounds are held at bay on misty bogland; in a famous series, Dublin housewives carry Christmas turkeys home from a side-street butcher, heads and necks and beaks dangling at their knees" - Colm Tóibín
National Photography Collection - archiving artists’ practices
The archiving of Tony O’Shea’s extensive archive was undertaken as a pilot project for the new National Photography Collection initiative at Photo Museum Ireland. Established in January 2022, the National Photography Collection will become the most comprehensive repository of Irish photography. A further strand will support artists to digitise their archives in order to assemble a comprehensive legacy of their practice.
Photo Museum Ireland is uniquely positioned to initiate this ambitious project. We are the only arts organisation in Ireland to offer artists fully serviced digital studio facilities including a professional film scanner – essential to ensure high-quality digitisation, as well as expert technical support. The collection will evolve alongside artist residency awards and publicly accessible archives for academics and researchers ensuring visibility for Irish artists nationally and internationally.
Tony O’Shea (b. 1947) studied English and Philosophy at University College Dublin. After UCD, he extensively travelled Asia and spet a year in japan where he became increasingly interested in photography. By 1981 he had begun working full-time as a photographer with In Dublin magazine and later for the Sunday Business Post. His first book Dubliners, including a text by Colm Tóibín was published by Macdonald Illustrated in 1996. A legendary figure in the context of Irish photography, O’Shea’s work occupies a pivotal role in the history of documentary practice here. Beginning in 2017 Photo Museum Ireland undertook the work of digitising O’Shea’s extensive archive. As a result of this a major retrospective titled The Light of Day was co-published by RRB Books and Photo Museum Ireland in 2020. The major retrospective exhibition of O’Shea’s work was showcased at the Museum in November 2022.
