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Tony Kearns has been the 'official' Willie Clancy week archival photographer for over a decade, Photographing the musicians appearing on the concerts in a studio set up, documenting the faces of Traditional music in Ireland. He has also extensively worked on candid shots of all other goings-on during the Willie week, shooting classes and sessions and what not. Running around hung with Rolleiflexes, Voigtlanders and the odd Leica.

As a follow up to his collaboration with Barry Taylor for 'A Touchstone for the Tradition' he has now launched his own book of photographs : Music & Light, Ceol & Solas : Irish traditional music photography by Tony Kearns.

I was at the launch in Spanish Point last night and had an enjoyable night as well as too many sandwiches and spicy wedges.

Working at my own ongoing project covering similar ground and often photographing the same situations as Tony maybe it's not my place to give an extensive critique of the work but I think the greatest value of Tony's work is in his studio shots, the documenting and putting faces to the names. His candid work is more variable, partly because of the difficult circumstances of dark crowded backrooms but sometimes I feel myself yearning for the acute eye and sense of composition and picking the right moment that is the hallmark of the work of for example Nutan, who is also working the same ground. That said though, and nitpicking aside, the atmosphere is caught well and there's a lot to enjoy with some lovely classic images. Certainly a book to have, when you're into photography and music. A valuable addition to the body of Irish music photography along-side the work of Nutan, Christy McNamara, Jill Freedman etc.



Recommended. The book can be ordered through Tony's website, linked above.

Two examples ( I love the Denis McMahon one):

Lovely stuff no doubt.

I agree that his strength is in the studio shots putting faces to well known names. There are quite a few the that I have heard of many times but never saw them in the flesh so to speak.
The candids are very atmospheric and well spotted.
The old smoking ban was a gift to photographers ...I don't know how many photographs of mine got spoiled over the years from smoke trails.

A wonderful project but I am still looking forward to your own so get cracking

Slan,
D.

I had Jackie Daly on to me last night pushing me and saying it would have been nice to have mine. Don't know. Still waiting to get the really good ones.

When Tony signed the Touchstone for the Tradition for me he wrote 'To Peter, a great photographer too' that really was a classic

Yes, very nice indeed. Is the collection all in B&W and/or shot originally on B&W film? There's something about it that color composition can't quite match.

Peter Laban wrote:it would have been nice to have mine.

Really. What are you waiting for? The perfect is the enemy of the great ...

The Ronan Browne photo reminds me of an Avendon composition. I think it has to do with the back drop.

lovely shots (and you're looking very composed with your whistle there Peter )

MarkP wrote:lovely shots (and you're looking very composed with your whistle there Peter )

Don't get me started..

There's another one of me on his site. That didn't make the book either, as it shouldn't have (you'll have to buy the book to see the one that did (a studio one and didn't I look rough at the time).

peter, is the group shot in gleeson's, or....? i've seen all parties playing in clare sessions, but in b&w am not certain of this particular banquette & wall pics....i nabbed frank brunel's cd a couple of months ago, very nice stuff....

yes, add my voice to the chorus nagging for your own collection to see the light of day....

Yes Gleeson's with Kieran Crehan, Jackie Daly, Frank and the rest of them. Willie week some time. Maybe it look odd because the wall in normally not so pixelated. The pictures on the wall were there for years, Josie Hayes, Junior, Tommy McCarthy and all the others looking over your shoulder all the time.

There was a moment at some point where Niall Crehan was sitting next to me (it may have been a different night/year altogether) and both our sons climbed on stage, each of them the spitting image of their daddy and fell asleep on our laps while we were playing. At that point I wanted to shout at Tony to take the fecking shot but he just stood there and never saw the potential.

That's probably good, there are several situations in the book we both photographed and yet came away with very different pictures.

is that Grainne playing the concertina?

oh, i thought it was katie o'sullivan....

Very nice Peter - thanks for sharing! Maybe someday I'll get to go to Ireland and see for myself.

Best,

Deisman

[Thread revival. - Mod]

***HELP*** WANT TO KNOW WHO IS CAYDEN?

Cayden wrote:Yes Gleeson's with Kieran Crehan, Jackie Daly, Frank and the rest of them. Willie week some time. Maybe it look odd because the wall in normally not so pixelated. The pictures on the wall were there for years, Josie Hayes, Junior, Tommy McCarthy and all the others looking over your shoulder all the time.

There was a moment at some point where Niall Crehan was sitting next to me (it may have been a different night/year altogether) and both our sons climbed on stage, each of them the spitting image of their daddy and fell asleep on our laps while we were playing. At that point I wanted to shout at Tony to take the fecking shot but he just stood there and never saw the potential.

Aha! Turns out that the weirdly barest-of-bones Cayden we see here isn't the real Cayden at all, but a glitch. The OP is actually Mr.Gumby under a former username. Why this glitch happened remains a mystery; the real Cayden joined in 2012, well after this thread's inception. No false-Cayden posts appear in the real Cayden's post record. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way we know of to correct the error.

Thanks to Mr.Gumby for so swiftly pointing this out to me. If I knew of this glitch before, I'd entirely forgotten about it. I'm likely to remember from now on.

Nanohedron wrote:Unfortunately, there seems to be no way we know of to correct the error.

Disregard if you've considered all the following before...

There are definitely ways to merge users. But what you have here is a current user (Mr.Gumby) and a non-user (the false Cayden) who may or may not appear to the database as a single entity. If there's something still linking all the false-Cayden posts (original join date of ex-user, IP address, whatever), I think you should still be able to run some fairly simple query on the database to at least change the 'Cayden' name to something else and perhaps even attribute to the current Mr.Gumby, but afraid I've no idea of table structure etc. because I don't know phpBB beyond end-user experience (mainly as a member here because I think this is the only phpBB board I use).

Might still be possible regardless if you can specify something like 'name is X and join date/user id/whatever is *not* Y', but you need someone who knows both MySQL and phpBB to advise.