The above image appeared in The Irish Independent‘s Weekend Magazine, on April 2013, as part of Behind the Lens, a series where the editors ask “Ireland’s best known photographers to send us a shot of their proudest work and explain in a few lines why it’s their favourite piece. ”
So, here’s what I wrote:
Continue reading “Behind the Lens: Sleeping Dragon Featured in Irish Independent Weekend Magazine” »
Brunnich’s Guillemot © Dave Walsh
So, penguins live in the south, and polar bears in the north – never the twain will meet, despite the best efforts of toymakers and cartoons. But was there ever penguins in the Arctic? Dave investigates.
Continue reading “Why there are no penguins in the Arctic” »
On Tuesday April 23, 2013, Greenpeace Belgium will launch Arctic: Another World?, a solo exhibition of my polar photography, at the Belgian Senate building in Brussels. Aimed at policymakers, the exhibition runs until the 26th and is not open to the general public – but I’m currently working with Greenpeace and other partners to setup a big public exhibition in Brussels in the coming months – more news on this very soon!
Continue reading “The Arctic: Another World? Opens in Brussels” »
I’m delighted to share these images with you – my picture of an iceberg, made in Nugatsiaq, West Greenland in 2009, has been featured on the front cover of the March 2013 issue of GEO France magazine (circulation 250,000). I made the image, of a high altitude cloud ‘erupting’ over a triple-arched iceberg, while sailing by on the Greenpeace icebreaker, Arctic Sunrise.
Continue reading “Arctic Iceberg photo makes front cover of GEO France” »
I’ve done a few interviews recently, all of which have had the unexpected outcome of telling me more about myself, my photography, and my reason for doing things than I had expected. The latest interview was by the insightful writer, photographer and web designer David Moore, who has been a friend and colleague for almost 16 years. We know each other from our days in Dublin. Now, he’s in New Mexico and I’m in Brussels, we had to catch up over Skype, instead of over Guinness in Ryans of Parkgate St.
David has devised a simple, and intriguing interview format: each photographer suggests two of their own images and two by other photographers, and David asks questions about the photographer’s relationship with each.
Off the coast of southeast Ireland lie the two small Saltee Islands. Their simple, low-slung landscapes, four or five kilometres of the Wexford fishing village of Kilmore Quay belie their layers of history, folklore and bizarre stories. On approach, there are few warnings of the extent of the islands’ abundant wildlife, but more than 220 species of birds live, nest, or migrate through the Saltees, including gannets, fulmars, kittiwakes, puffins, shearwaters, razorbills and guillemots, all completely unfussed by human visitors. Curious grey seals eat fish scraps from the hands of fishermen, and stalk daytrippers who walk the cliffs – their big doe eyes staring up plaintively from the azure waters below.
Nothing is ordinary here. So I didn’t write anything ordinary.
Continue reading “A Micronation Once Again: The Saltee Islands” »
Congratulations to Jack Laurenson and the team at Inquire Magazine, which yesterday scooped Best News and Business Magazine and Best Launch (new magazine) – at the Digital Magazine Awards.
Continue reading “The Cold Edge in Inquire Magazine” »
The Cold Edge Launch, photo © Alex Yallop
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Welcome to my winter newsletter, with news on the continuing Cold Edge adventure, how you can get your hands on the Cold Edge book and a chance to catch my photographs at the Christmas Exhibition at The Copper House, Dublin, from this Thursday, November 29th.
Continue reading “Winter Newsletter: The Cold Edge Continues” »
Great news: The 2012 Christmas exhibition opens on November 29th at Dublin’s Copper House Gallery, featuring my Cold Edge photographs, and runs until – January 8th 2013. If you’re in Dublin, drop in and check out my photographs, and the work of many talented artists.
Continue reading “Christmas exhibition at The Copper House” »
Thanks to Lauren Margolis, and the guys over at Photoshelter for taking time out of mopping after the recent Hurricane Sandy, to publish a fun Q&A with me about photographing in icy and very sunny conditions.
Lauren writes:
Picture this: You’re out on a ship in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. From afar, the icebergs look like moderately-sized chunks. But as you get closer, you realize that your little ship dwarfs in comparison to these monstrous beings, and they’re actually not still at all, but slowly bobbing in the water. And every now and then, a hunk (the size of your head? your car? you can’t tell from here) breaks off the side.
It might sound nerve-racking, but polar and environmental photographer Dave Walsh lives for this kind of adventure. “The frozen regions of our planet have the power to ignite imaginations,” says Dave, “but for most of the 7 billion people on Earth, the Arctic and Antarctic remain abstract and unreachable.”
Great news: A selection of images from The Cold Edge series has been featured by the Discovery News homepage!
The Arctic is changing. Summer sea ice extent this year was at its lowest in the satellite record as global warming tightens its grip. But change is relative. At their most hostile, the polar regions remain cold and forbidding: as photographer Dave Walsh calls them in his new book, “The Cold Edge” of the planet.
Walsh, who has traveled to Arctic and Antarctic multiple times over the last several years, launched his book with an exhibit at the Copper House Gallery in his native Ireland. “I wanted my photographs” – such as this iceberg, a bright blue as a result of ice being compressed for thousands of years – “to inspire people to not only fall in love with their home planet, but to start giving a damn and take action to protect it.” says Walsh.
Back in mid-October, The Straits Times in Singapore ran a double spread with my Cold Edge photographs, with the title “Knock ‘em cold”. It’s good to see my pictures getting a run in Asia – so far The Cold Edge has gotten coverage in Australia, Europe and the US – next, Africa!
Thanks to Malcolm McLeod, picture editor at The Straits Times for choosing the images, Niall O’Leary at Millennium Images for making this happen, and to Caroline Bowler – a friend of mine living in Singapore, for posting the newspaper to me.
Things to lament, things to celebrate: Last week I had the pleasure of spending on hour on Skype with Roger Overall, who runs the insightful Documentary Photographer podcast, talking about photography, the state of the planet, and the relationship between the photographer and the eventual viewer.
Continue reading “Interview with Roger Overall, on the Documentary Photographer Podcast” »
When I was in Dublin recently, for the launch of my Cold Edge exhibition at the Copper House Gallery, I met up with Vanessa Monaghan, who interviewed me for Ireland’s RTE 2XM radio show Culture Cafe. In the interview, I talk about the inspirations and passions that drive my work, and what draws me to the magical Arctic and Antarctic ecosystems. The Arctic and Antarctic are part of our planet – and the Arctic is not far away from Ireland – the earth is a closed, finite system – the polar regions are part of our life. It’s now threatened by pollution, and resource exploitation.
Listen to the Cold Edge Interview » (MP3, 9.7MB, 10 minutes)
Continue reading “2XM Cold Edge Radio interview with Dave Walsh” »
Julie Grahame, editor of aCurator Magazine writes:
If you’re lucky enough to be in Dublin between now and September 29th, it looks as if you can’t miss Dave Walsh’s exhibition of polar photographs. As much as I love the back-lit screen, it seems redundant to say these must look spectacular in-person.
Thanks, Julie!
The Cold Edge Launch, photo © Alex Yallop
Introduced by curator Leszek Wolnik, and poet Duncan Cleary, my Cold Edge Exhibition opened on September 13th 2012, in Dublin’s Copper House Gallery, Dublin, featuring 16 limited editions prints of my polar photographs. It both was sobering and exciting to enter the gallery earlier in the day to see the work made flesh – the images that have been part of my life, part of my mind for so long, now printed, huge, and hung upon a gallery wall. From that moment, I realised, the pictures are no longer really mine – I’ve shared them with the wider world, for people to impose their own expectations and assumptions upon them. I’m quite happy about this, I have no interest in stifling my work, or worrying the chance that someone might misinterpret it. It’s out there, wild, and free to be interpreted.
Continue reading “The Cold Edge Launch at the Copper House Gallery” »
The Guardian have featured my Cold Edge images in the run up my exhibition of Polar Photography opening tomorrow in Dublin.
To celebrate the launch of the Cold Edge exhibition of my polar photography in Dublin, on September 13, I’ve created a beautiful 60-page eponymous book, The Cold Edge, via Blurb – print and iPad version. I’ve brought together some of what I hope are ethereal, emotional photographs of the unforgiving wilderness, wild animals and blue icebergs question our romantic relationship with remote, harsh and pristine environments. Images that resonate with a quiet tension; all may not be right in the Garden of Eden.
Continue reading “The Cold Edge: The Book” »
Update: Pictures from the Cold Edge Opening night
Blog from the Cold Edge launch
There comes a time in a photographer’s life when (s)he finally gets to announce the Big News; a first major solo exhibition. It’s unnerving, exciting, heartening, and reassuring. There’s also the sense of achievement, and a feeling of “yes, I was right to hammer away so for many years on something I care passionately about”. And so, many, many thanks to Leszek Wolnik, at The Copper House Gallery in Dublin who has invited me to show my work on September 13th, 2012.
Continue reading “The Cold Edge: Polar Photography Exhibition Dublin” »
Our ship approaches a smooth dome of barren rock, worn clean by several millennia of glacial endeavor, in a lonely Arctic waterway, farm from the nearest human settlement. It’s July 2009, and I’m board the Greenpeace ship Arctic sunrise, on a four-month expedition with glacialogists and climatalogists on Greenland’s glaciers – and how they’re reacting to climate change. I made some lovely images while on board, too, and here’s a blog about Fata Morgana – Mirages in Nares Strait.
Apart from a tiny weather station, there’s feck all here – yet Hans Island has spent decades at the centre of a sometimes surreal territorial dispute.
Continue reading “Hans Island Debacle Nearing A Solution?” »
