I’ve just found out today that, thanks to the team at Millennium Images, an image from my Bull Island series has been used as the cover of Tim Parks’ book, Teach Us to Sit Still. I have not read the book, or held a copy in my hand, but every review I’ve looked at today suggests that like my other recent book cover, Rebecca Solnit’s The Book of Migrations, I will be proud to have my photograph associated with Parks’ work.

According to the blurb:

“Teach Us to Sit Still is the visceral, thought-provoking, and inexplicably entertaining story of how Tim Parks found himself in serious pain, how doctors failed to help, and the quest he took to find his own way out. Overwhelmed by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, Parks follows a fruitless journey through the conventional medical system only to find relief in the most unexpected place: a breathing exercise that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parks anticipated finding answers; he was about as far from New Age as you can get. As everything that he once held true is called into question, Parks confronts the relationship between his mind and body, the hectic modern world that seems to demand all our focus, and his chosen life as an intellectual and writer. He is drawn to consider the effects of illness on the work of other writers, the role of religion in shaping our sense of self, and the influence of sports and art on our attitudes toward health and well-being. Most of us will fall ill at some point; few will describe that journey with the same verve, insight, and radiant intelligence as Tim Parks.”

Teach Us to Sit Still on Tim Parks’ website
Teach Us to Sit Still on Amazon.com
Teach Us to Sit Still on Amazon.co.uk

Niall O’Leary and the team at Millennium Images in London, have created an online portfolio of my Arctic and Antarctic images under the banner of “The Cold Edge“. You can see the selection of images here, or read on for more:

I’ve written an artists statement to accompany the images:

I have succumbed to the draw of the Polar Regions; a slave to its unforgiving climate, the simple, savage food chain, the landscapes, seascapes and icescapes. The high Arctic and Antarctic still lie largely beyond the reach of most of us 7 billion, but not from the effects of our lifestyles – climate change and ocean acidification are just two of the threats driven by our spiraling use of fossil fuels.

It’s these concerns, along with the light and the infinite degrees of colour that lure me back; the harsh 24-hour glare of summer, the long shadows of morning and evening, and the dark sunless days of winter when the aurora and moon dictate the rules to photographers. I don’t enjoy the cold, but I love those grey days when the light is abundant and precise, refracted through the dense blue ice of glacier fragments. The iceberg blues defy both imagination and the senses, leaving me with nothing but my images as testimony to my experience.

I’m told my images emanate a quiet tension; perhaps my passion for nature and the polar zones is tempered with my unease that all may not be right in the Garden of Eden. We humans are only starting to grasp how we are fouling our own nest, and how our daily behaviour has repercussions elsewhere. It’s a small world, after all.

The Cold Edge – Images by Dave Walsh

Based in London, Millennium Images holds more than 30,000 contemporary photographic art images by over 600 photographers, representing the best in contemporary photography.Visit Millennium Images website.

The Millennium images website reads:
“Dave Walsh is a photographer, writer and environmental campaigner from Wexford, in the south east of Ireland. With an interest in human interaction with the natural environment, Walsh has sailed on board numerous Greenpeace expeditions to far-flung places, including several trips to the Arctic and Antarctic, where he has produced a number of breathtaking images.”

“In December 2011, Dave is traveling to northern Finland to make photographs – where the sun will have already set for the year.”

A portfolio of five of my photographs has been featured in issue four of the excellent Irish photography magazine The Shot. A big thanks to editors Karl and John who are masterminding the project; each issue showcases five photographers with five images each, and five hundred words to talk about themselves and their photography. The current issue includes an interview with Anthony Haughey

For my portfolio, The Shot selected a combination of images from the Arctic – a polar bear and walrus; and the Antarctic – a majestic iceberg, juxtaposed with industrial images. The relief drilling rigs at the site of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and closer to home, the twin smoke stacks of the iconic Poolbeg electricity generation station in Dublin. There’s a theme at work here, of course – our hunger for resources, and the related threat of climate change.

You can view Issue 4 of The Shot here… and the main website of The Shot here.

Here’s The Shot selection:

The Shot Selection

In all my years as a writer, I’ve written many book reviews. But I’ve never before reviewed a book that uses one of my photographs as its cover. I’m talking about The Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland, by Rebecca Solnit, which has been a joy to read, and an honour to become connected with. I was unaware of Solnit’s work until May 24th of this year, when I read her insightful article the Strauss-Kahn affair, colonisation and the IMF: Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite. That afternoon, I received an email from Bob Bhamra, of Verso Books, asking me if he could use my image of the Burren for a new editon of The Book of Migrations. Serendipity. We cut a deal.

A couple of months pass, and a copy of The Book of Migrations arrives. I take it with me on a train from Amsterdam to Perpignan, and fall in love with the text. Solnit’s book is an exploration of the nature of being, place and travel, overlaying a real, physical itinerary around Ireland. First published in 1997, it talks of an Ireland that existed then, Irelands that are long gone, and Irelands that will go on existing and evolving. The author never slips into the obsequiousness that haunts many Irish-American writers – on the contrary, her prose, and her understanding of the transient subtleties and cultural inconsistencies of any country – in this case Ireland – make her a trustworthy commentator. Solnit not only has a deep reach when it comes to historical and cultural knowledge, she has the craft and perspective to draw together and connect the multiple patterns she has observed.

As Solnit walks the roads of Ireland, through Cork, Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo, she muses on the issues that, despite the expectations of visitors – especially – Irish Americans, Ireland is a fixed pin in place and time, a constantly shifting concept, and like a fractal, the closer you look, the more detail emerges. Like distance. It’s something I’ve long felt about Ireland – for a tiny country, it’s very very big. When you’re used to crossing our island, talks by Americans or Australians, or mainland Europeans of six or eight hour drives are unfathomable. I’ve driven Sydney to Melbourne in day, sailed by ship across the equator and towards both poles, yet a one hour drive in Co. Clare can provide more distraction than a marathon journey across some larger land. I’m forever dissuading foreign visitors of the assumption that an Irish 100km can be breached within a mere standard hour. They scorn me, then turn up hours late, laden with yarns of sheep and cattle and pubs and bad directions.

As Solnit writes:

“On my previous trip my sense of scale had veered wildly shaped as it is by continental and interstate scale: I would look at a place on the map and say We can’t go there, it’s all the way across the country, the realize the country was hardly a hundred and fifty miles across, only a few hours on a straight highway, and finally find that the slow winding roads of the countryside keep the island large after all, in a way that has nothing to do with notions of objective scale. The roads had been built not for long-distance travel, but to connect the dots of adjoining towns, and they do so in a serpentine lines that writhe even more to accommodate the steep terrain of the west.”

Through her travels Solnit touches on the bizarre Dublin Dead Zoo, the butterfly legacy of Roger Casement, the pirate queen Grace O’Malley, Sweeney – a king destined to live as a bird amongst the trees, the Dublin of James Joyce and Leopold Bloom the Irish Traveller culture, the deforestation of Ireland, the Great Famine and the subsequent decades of emigration, The Destruction Of Da Derga’s Hostel, tourism, travel and oral culture:

“At least for outsiders much of Ireland’s charm is that it is still, however literate, an oral culture. Talk is a principal form of entertainment and art, and internal memory hasn’t been entirely eclipsed by recorded history or amnesia. Storytelling itself has been in long decline elsewhere, in part because the generations are all but segregated in most industrial societies, because a tale requires a leisurely pace for both tell and listeners, and because telling has been replaced by commercial entertainment. The appetite for stories seems undiminished, but the information and entertainment media have evolved to fill it with narratives in which the listener is forever inaudible and invisible, never the teller or part of the tale. These sources don’t really replace firsthand stories, which cast their glow over the events and places of one’s own life, incorporate one into a community of meanings.”

Apart from our photographic & literary crossover, Solnit’s wanderings – both geographical and philosophical – seem to intersect my own. My photograph on the cover of The Book of the Migrations the Burren, in Co. Clare shows the clints and grikes of the limestone karst, the positive-negative, +/_ wave forms of the frozen stone. Romantically assumed to be a barren, desolate and hostile landscape, the Burren (boireann, meaning stoney place) is anything but – farms and hundreds of bronze age stone forts are sprinkled throughout the landscape. Dozens of species of orchids grace the landscape, and Alpine and Mediterranean grow alongside each other. Wild goats, viviparous lizards and slow worms, foxes and ravens makes their homes here.

I may be a Wexfordman, but with a Galway mother, my heart is firmly on the west coast. Co. Clare, while it may lack the serious mountain ranges of Kerry or Galway, is a magical place – a county of musicians and storytellers and matchmakers, where the routing of a dual carriageway close to a fairy tree causes havoc. The veil is thin in Co. Clare, between this world and the next – the only other place in Ireland I have this profound sense is Sligo.

I made the Burren photograph in the summer of 2006, while working on a migration of my own – I had decided to up sticks and move from Dublin city centre to the surf town Lahinch. I spent a weekend checking out houses in the area, and ended up on the Green Road across the Burren with my notorious accomplice Damien, where I made the Burren photograph. The image ended up in my online library, waiting for its day, until discovered by Bob, from Verso and progressed to gracing Rebecca Solnit’s book.

Next week, early October 2011, I’ll be hiking through the ancient oak forests of Co. Kerry, to witness the autumn rut of the red deer. Solnit too describes her experiences in the woods around Killarney, and I hope I can return with images to match her prose.

A Book of Migrations
Verso Books: A Book of Migrations
A Book of Migrations on Amazon.com
A Book of Migrations on Amazon.co.uk

See my original image of Burren Clints and Grikes »

Two Arctic Terns fight off a Long Tailed Skua by a blue iceberg in Kongsfjord, near the Arctic scientific research base of Ny-Alesund, Svalbard. Another picture that’s evaded discovery for over a year – I love how the battle between the birds lends scale to the improbable blue of the iceberg. You can view more of my iceberg images here »

© 2010 Dave Walsh – All Rights Reserved

Interested in a print? Please contact me.
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Arctic Tern, sterna paradisea, hovering near the dog yard Ny Alesund, Svalbard. Arctic terns migrate more than any other species bird – up to 35,000km per year for some birds, as the travel to Antarctica and back, and can enjoy two polar summers. The terns nest in the tundra in the scientific research centre of Ny Alesund, where they lay eggs, and tend to attack passersby in self-defence.

This is one of those gems that turn up more than a year after the images is made, missed during some hurried edit. I was searching in a folder from the 2010 trip to Svalbard when I found this lovely image. View it large »

Photographing flowers and undwear at the Keukenhof

Photographing People, Photographing flowers. An ugly, and probably mildly tasteless set of images, where I photograph people photographing flowers, and often show off their backsides along the way. Images made on April 2011 at the Keukenhof tulip show at Lisse, Netherlands.

I was visiting what claims to be world’s largest flower garden with my mother and girlfriend – playing tourist. Camera out, not expecting masterpieces, perhaps to intercept some interesting scene. I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of the crowds, dressed in multi-coloured outfits to celebrate the seven million tulips planted in the Keukenhof each spring. Neither was I prepared to be caught in the digital camera crossfire as visitors took thousand upon thousand of snapshots of flowerbeds, or themselves with tulips, destined for imprisonment on a hard disk somewhere, or perhaps an appearance their Facebook profile. There seemed to be a relentless drive to capture endless, context-less images of the too-perfect, uniform, and altogether not very natural domestic tulips. I have never, ever, seen a field of wildflowers being trampled by hundreds of hassled, stressed tourists searching for the perfect souvenir shot. And perhaps I never will.

I forgot about shooting ‘straight’ images, and instead started shooting like a street photographer. Despite the vegetation, the Keukenhof, on a Sunday in April, is a very urban environment. I photographed people photographing each other, photographing flowers, showing off their blue-jeaned, boxer-shorted backsides as they snapped images. I stole images of their solemnity, their stress and the kitsch hell of it all. My few hours at the Keukenhof put me in mind of the original Tulip Mania bubble in the 17th century. IT got so crazy that one Dutch Viceroy tulip bulbs could apparently fetch 2,500 Florins, at a time when when a skilled labourer might only make 150 Florins in an entire year.

There’s more of the Keukenhof madness in the slideshow below, or view the gallery.

People, Photographing Flowers – Keukenof Tulip Show – Images by Dave Walsh

Transocean Development Driller rigs in squall at Deepwater Horizon disaster site.

It has taken not much more than half a century to turn the Gulf of Mexico into an Urban Ocean, dotted with 27,000 abandoned wells, and nearly 4,000 active platforms, interconnected by an incredible 40,000km of pipelines. At sea, no matter where you are in the northern Gulf of Mexico, you can see the blinking lights of an oil platform, a small steel city unto itself, or perhaps a rusting ghost town. The Deepwater Horizon disaster, in April 2010 drew attention to this industrialisation of the Gulf, and hinted to the public the existence a scarred landscape that exists just over the horizon from the shorelines of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. In September 2010, I worked on board a Greenpeace ship carrying out research to measure the impact of the oil spill, from where I got to observe the oil rigs drafted into the Deepwater Horizon site dwarfed by powerful rainstorms, and the wildlife that still prevails – the hummingbirds, the sperm whales, the flying fish and the powerful rainstorms.

Deepwater Horizon & Gulf of Mexico – Images by Dave Walsh

Watch the slideshow large »

I’m pleased to see that one of my Tasmanian Devil pictures has shown up in May/June edition of Sierra Club magazine, in an article called Sympathy for the Devils. UPDATE June 28th: This image has also been used by New Scientist article, “Tasmanian devils were sitting ducks for deadly cancer”.

Following on from some photographs I shot in 2008, I returned to Tasmania in November 2009, and went into the field with scientists who are working on conserving Tasmanian Devils, in light of the spread of a contagious cancer, known as Devil Facial Tumour Disease which continues to decimate the population in many parts of the island.

Here’s some more images of tassie devils, and the places I visited:

See my full collection of Tasmanian Devil photographs

For more information about Tasmanian Devils, and the facial tumour disease, visit http://www.tassiedevil.com.au/

Many thanks to Adina LoBiondo at Sierra magazine for choosing my devil!

My friend, distant cousin and co-conspirator Barry Kavanagh has seen fit to use my portrait of him – made on the fly one night in Dublin’s Long Hall pub, on the cover of the new Dacianos album, Fables for Another Time.

From the sleeve of Fables for Another Time

Quantum Suicide is a scientific thought experiment. The scientist sits in front of a gun that is set up to either trigger or misfire, depending on the decay of a radioactive atom. With each run of the experiment, there is a 50% chance the gun will trigger. Under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the gun will eventually kill the scientist. But if the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation is correct, then at each run of the experiment there will be a universe in which the scientist lives, and another in which he dies. The scientist can only ever be conscious of the world in which he LIVES, and so never seems to die. This leads to the fanciful speculation that the many-worlds interpretation implies all conscious beings are immortal.
(Imagine the scientist, realizing he cannot die, stepping outside the lab and seeing for the first time what is worthwhile about existence).

Dacianos – Quantum Suicide.wav by Barry Kavanagh

Read more and buy the album on the Dacianos website »

The photograph of Barry stems from our furthering of an Irish stereotype – he, Damien and I were sitting in The Long Hall pub, in Dublin, Christmas 2010. Here’s a few more images from that night:

The Long Hall, December 2010 – Images by Dave Walsh