Matt’s photo chosen as overall winner of calendar competition

It was a Friday so there would be no meat: what was on the menu was herrings. Tossed in flour. Fried on a pan on the traditional Aga stove.

And then the kettle was boiled for tea – at which point Matt Nolan lifted his camera and snapped a single shot of his host, John Conroy, pouring boiling water into the teapot.

The result is a subtly stunning shot, a picture that captures the kindness of the now-deceased John, and that provides a record of the artefacts important enough to him to be on display in his kitchen – a papal image, a statue of St Martin de Porres, a crucifix.

That moment in time is now about to be shared with the nation, as the photograph has been selected by the Irish Independent for inclusion in its calendar for 2022 – and won Ballagh resident Matt top prize in the competition for entries run by the newspaper.

But then photographing people is a skill which retired fisheries officer Matt has honed over a lifetime of taking not mere snaps, but carefully considered portraits.

Recalling the day he took his award-winning shot of John, who lived in the Gaeltacht of Rathcairn near Athboy, Matt explains that it was not merely a case of turning up and asking his friend to pose.

“I went up one Friday morning. John was just after coming back from Athboy. He had a few herrings with him because he’d never eat meat on a Friday, and he was in full flight getting the herrings ready for the pan: he was cleaning them out and he was rolling them in flour and he was putting them down in the pan and then himself and myself sat down to attack the herrings.

“Anyway, the herrings were over, and John was an awful man to talk and tell stories. And he was a Gaeltacht man – he was one of the migrants who came down in the 1930s as a child, but while he came here in the ‘30s, his heart and soul never left Connemara. Every day he would be wandering around Meath, in the fields, but his head would be over with the guys cutting seaweed or bringing the turf to Aran or whatever.

“His mind was always out there. And the stories he had about Connemara were fantastic. He was a brilliant storyteller. I learned a lot of my Irish from him because his Irish was extraordinarily rich.

“So after we finished the herrings and a lot of stories, John, of course, had to make a cup of tea before I left, and he just took out the kettle, and I never said anything. I just snapped the photograph as he was making the tea. I never said anything.

“But I only took one photograph. Normally I take two or three or four photographs. I took the one and that was the photograph I sent in there to the independent.

“It was quite a number of years ago, and John has died since, and that’s the one thing that upsets me about winning, that John isn’t around, because he would have been so proud and been so excited about all the fuss and about his photograph winning.”

Matt loves Rathcarn, and the people there: he even produced a book about the area and the people there, ‘An Talamh Bán’.

It is portraiture that most interests Matt: “I like taking photographs of people. They are the most difficult of all.

“If I’m taking a photograph of you, for instance, I cannot just slap you outside the house and say ‘Bang! I want to take photograph of you’. Just like that. I have to sit down with you. And I have to get to know a little bit about you. And you have to get to know a bit about me. And I have to reassure you what I’m doing with the photograph and why I’m taking it, all that kind of thing.

“And I’d often ask people ‘where would you like me to take the photograph?’. And very often, it’s a kind of relationship between the photographer and the person who is being photographed. Because if you don’t do that, people are a little bit touchy and nervous. And you see a lot of tenseness in it.

“And if you look at photograph of John Conroy for instance, he is very relaxed in it. But it’s not just the photograph of John that I try to take: I have to tell a story as well, about the person. It’s not just a photograph of a person like you have in a passport. Like it has John Conroy standing in his traditional kitchen. He has a traditional range that he’s making the tea on; behind him is the dresser, and in the dresser there is Pope John the 23rd; little statues of Padre Pio and little leprechauns; and there’s a huge old-style radio with a small little transistor beside it and all sorts of little photographs that were taken back through the years, black and white photographs hanging up; stuck in behind different shelves.

“The artefacts around tell me the story of the man himself. Like John Connery was quite a religious man – he never had meat on a Friday and he went to Mass every Sunday and went to Knock once a year – and you can see that in the photograph.

“And he was a tidy, neat man and you can almost see that as well. And are two giant arm chairs in front of the range as well, so he was a relaxed man in his own way as well.”

Matt believes the skill in photography depends to a much smaller extent in the equipment;

“Technical stuff isn’t my thing. You know? The trouble with a lot of photographers is they spend a lot of time talking about cameras and what their camera can do and what they would be able to do if they bought a new camera.

“Most great photographs are taken simply by people who have an eye for or an interest in photographs rather than people with two bags of equipment. So I am not a tech guy. I just take a photograph. And hopefully with the technology now I can see whether the exposure is correct and if it is sharp enough and if those two things are right, I don’t ask any more questions.”

Matt still appreciates the fact that when he was starting off in photography, the local papers gave him an outlet for his photos.

“That’s important, especially for young photographers starting off that they have some place to put their photographs.”

He went on to have several series of photographs published locally, and indeed he often interviewed his subjects as well.

“When I take people’s photographs, I like to sit down with them and talk to them about their lives and an awful lot of people – especially older people – are only too to delighted to do that.

“But as I said, with my photographs, if I take a photograph of somebody I like to photograph to tell a story about the person. It must tell a story. Otherwise it’s no good.”