All that can be

John BeRMinghaM

My creative journey began just as I was turning 7. I grew up in a small village in County Limerick called Murroe. In the weeks before my birthday, I spotted a camera on the counter of our local shop. It was red and had ‘Cool Pix’ written on the front; it had a built-in flash and came with a 24-exposure film and 2 AA batteries. I was due to make my communion two days before my 7th birthday and figured between the two I’d surely have the twenty four pounds to acquire my very first camera. There are two photographs from that first roll that I still think of today, one – a photo of my sister, 3 years old at the time, because it still sits on the mantlepiece in my parents’ house today; and the other, ‘man playing guitar’ - latent only in my mind at this point. ‘Man playing guitar’ was important to me because as I looked through the viewfinder of my Cool Pix at guitar man I realised that if I moved him to the right of the frame it looked ‘like a movie’, thus being my first uneducated conscious compositional choice. This shifting of the frame also did something else: it allowed me to capture the people in the opposite garden (guitar man was sitting on a wall between the two) who sat listening to him, my first moment of context.

Context is something that I consider across all the things I make: compositional context, conceptual context, environmental, political, philosophical. It is also something that tends to dictate people’s reactions to the work. I recall sitting in the Visual Centre at the George Bernard Shaw Theatre in Carlow, in September 2019, as my series of images ‘Think About The Future’ was being displayed, anonymously, on stage to be judged for the Associateship of The Irish Photographic Federation. A couple sitting behind me were discussing the images as they were revealed and found each one more horrible than the last - ‘this is terrible, too much empty space in that one, oh my God, a baby!’. Afterwards, at the break, the judges had my panel put back up on stage for people to come and look at more closely. The panel, presented with a statement, had been successful and, on viewing it as a whole, that same horrified couple came up to me to say how much they liked it.

I have struggled with relating to the world since I came into it and art has always been my conduit of comfort. Without the musicians, artists, film-makers, and poets that I discovered at a young age I would have been stuck at 13, 14 looking at the world thinking, ‘well, this is some kind of puzzle I’m just not the right shape for’. Creating has never been a hobby, or now just a job, for me. These things mean everything to me. I have always found a way to create: discovering a strange quirk of my dad’s hifi where both tape decks would play simultaneously led me to start recording my keyboard and layering tracks, and connecting a second stereo that would record my mixes, using my granddad’s camcorder to make rudimentary stop-motion stories with my toys, and when we got our first PC in the house, discovering the unlimited creative possibilities that all these ones and zeros provide.