From Avoca to Africa — Part One: The Dream
A Village in Wicklow
I grew up in Avoca, a small village in County Wicklow, Ireland. A place of quiet fields, wooded valleys and the slow meeting of two rivers. Africa could not have felt further away.
And yet it was always there somewhere in the back of my mind. A continent I couldn't explain and had never seen. A pull I couldn't account for and didn't try to.
A Village in Wicklow
The Vale of Avoca, County Wicklow, Ireland — where the story begins
Someone Else's Life
I had played sports since I could walk. But Ireland in the 1980s was a country with little work and fewer opportunities, and like so many generations before me, my parents included, leaving was just what you did. I was eighteen when I headed to London.
I found work where I could. A department store first, then a bank. It was playing rugby for that bank that changed things, a contact made on the pitch led to a career as a money broker. Suddenly, I had an income, a path, a reason to stay.
Through my twenties, I kept playing, but with a career now depending on my hands and my health, I became cautious about injury. Sport slowly gave way to other things. And it was in that space that Don McCullin found me.
The city, the salary, the suit — it wasn't a bad life. It just wasn't mine.
London, Revisited
Walking the South Bank in 2017 — the city that shaped me, seen differently now
The Book That Changed Everything
It was a chance find. Browsing a secondhand bookshop in the City of London one afternoon, I noticed a book on the shelf, a Don McCullin retrospective. I picked it up.
One photograph stopped me cold. An Irish homeless man. Forgotten. Invisible. Something about it reached in and unsettled me in a way I couldn't immediately explain.
Who was he? What had happened to him? Like me, he had come to London to find work and a dream. A different journey perhaps, but the same island, the same distance from home. That could have been me. It very nearly was.
In that moment, I understood something about the power of a single photograph. One black and white print. No words. And yet it asked more questions than most books ever do.
I became obsessed. Photography courses, fine art printing, City and Guilds, and an A Level. Exhibitions every chance I got. And then one afternoon in 1995, I stumbled across the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum.
I had no idea what I was walking into. I stood in those halls and felt something shift.
Little did I know that I would one day have my own work hanging in those same hallowed halls, winning the competition not once but three times, in 2011, 2013 and 2017, each time as a category winner.
But that was still a long way off. First, there was Tokyo.
One Photograph. One Question.
A single image in a London bookshop changed the direction of my life
Dreaming of Africa from Tokyo
When the company transferred me to Tokyo, I went. And it was there, of all places, that Africa came back. I built a darkroom in my second bathroom, did street photography on weekends, and mixed with other amateur photographers. The craft was deepening quietly, without a plan.
And every month, a copy of Getaway magazine, a South African travel publication, arrived. I read every issue cover to cover in my Tokyo apartment. Dreaming of a continent from the other side of the world.
Africa wasn't going anywhere. And neither, it turned out, was I.
