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A Nice show of snaps for Christy

CRUSHEEN photographer, Christy McNamara currently has an exhibition of his work on show in Nice.
A musician himself, his photographs of traditional musicians form part of an event focussing on Ireland and the Celts in that region of France.
“The pictures are from a body of work that I’ve done on traditional Irish music, some of the images in it would go back to the mid nineties,” he says.
The pictures forming the exhibition have been on show in a host of European countries and in the US and he says that while the pictures may be distinctively Irish, they travel rather well. “Photography is all about images and it’s amazing that people are still interested in these images outside of Ireland. A lot of the material is drawn from Clare and older Ireland.”
What interests him most is capturing images of people. While he says he sometimes isn’t that active as a photographer, he has a fairly clear idea of the type of thing he wants. “When you take pictures you have to be where things are happening and sometimes there’s not much happening. Other times I would meet people and think about them and maybe come back and photograph them at another time. My eye works in a particular way, I’m interested in people in particular and ways of life that are vanishing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that book that the American photographer Dorothea Lange did on Ireland in the fifties. She created an incredible body of work and she worked with a lot of people in Clare. I’ve looked at the work of people like that and used them as a barometer for my own work.”
Whoopi Goldberg has one of his pictures, while Brad Pitt bought a renowned shot of Christy’s two aunts dancing. He says he likes to see how other people respond to the images. “I’m lucky enough that I get to do exhibitions and that people invite me to do that. You do something and put it on a wall and it takes on another life them. People respond to work and I’m very interested in how people respond to images, especially if you’re lucky enough to get it right.”
Technology has brought huge changes to photography but Christy is rather old school. “It’s all black and white photography (in the exhibition). I do colour as well, but I’d be more known for the black and white, I think it works in a different way. I still shoot with film, although the whole landscape of photography has changed since digital and the internet came along.”
In the future he’s hoping to put together a book on the Spancilhill Fair, while he has been preparing images of musical instrument makers for an exhibition in November. Some of his images can be seen on www.christymcnamara.com.

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