A Nenagh-based photographer has won the national Kodak Overall Portrait Photographer of the Year award. Mr Padraig O Flannabhra will receive a trophy and a cash prize of £1,000 at the Guinness Hopstore, Dublin, on Monday.
Mr O Flannabhra's subject, Mrs Nora Kelly, will receive a Brown Thomas shopping voucher and Kodak camera. The 83-year-old, who is a great-grandmother, is pictured on the Tipperary side of Lough Derg, near her birthplace at Hogan's Quay, outside the village of Pocan, holding a crucifix.
The competition was judged in Britain, with British judges. "There was no Irish input in this at all. It is good in that you can say with your hand on your heart that it was anonymous, that we did not know any of them," Mr O Flannabhra said.
The Kodak Portrait and Wedding Award is organised in four categories, brides, children under five, families and an open category which he won. He went on to win the overall award, taking the image with a Swedish Hasselblad camera, "the one the astronauts take to the moon", he said.
It is the eighth time he has won the overall award, and he has won the Kodak European Gold Portrait Award 10 times. "You have to be lucky and you have to have a good image," he said.
Unlike the "consumer-oriented" portrait and wedding award, the European one is purely artistic. "It allows you the freedom to express yourself without commercial constraint. One is judged by one's peers," he said.
Mr O Flannabhra, a former designer with Youghal Carpets, has been a professional photographer since 1984 and has published three books of his collections.
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