A life in search of wonder and beauty

Fergus Bourke's photography sidesteps the cliched images of Ireland to find the chaos and beauty at the heart of his subjects, writes Art O'Briain

An early spring morning in 2004 and the light in the majestic landscape is nearly perfect.

A small film crew, Fergus Bourke and myself are seated near a waterfall overlooking the Inagh Valley in Connemara. This would be a good time, I say to Bourke, to talk about your fascination with this place and why you have devoted 10 years of your life to capturing its mysterious chaos and beauty in magisterial black and white photographs.

We had already spent some time together, making this documentary on his life and work. He had a fund of stories, anecdotes and memories to call on in his own wry, humorous and sometimes dark way. These covered his work on the streets of Dublin in the 1960s, his photojournalism on Irish poverty in the 1970s, his Kindred series of portraits of the great and the good in the 1980s, and his influential period as official photographer with the Abbey Theatre.

He had once said to me that to be a great photographer "you have to be invisible and see the world through the eyes of a child" and as I looked at his body of work I could see that he had achieved a remarkable feat of artistic documentation.

So what has it all been about, I asked him.

"What is it I haven't already said?" was his reply.

He had moved with his wife, Maureen, and family from Sandymount to Pollough, between Moycullen and Oughterard, in 1990 because "the landscape was calling me" and he wanted to devote his energies to being within an environment that was largely devoid of human figures. This was a great contrast to his people-rich photography, his character studies of rich and poor in a variety of social contexts. I was curious to know what this journey for him was all about.

"You tell me," he shot back.

There are moments in the life of a film-maker when you reach an impasse and reluctance with the subject of your film and when you feel it might be better to let matters rest. He was in a contrary mood but I sensed he had something to say that I hadn't captured and we were in an inspirational spot for him to do so. He needed prodding. I tried again.

"I'll tell you what . . . I'll say something to you and you can respond to it whatever way you like," I told him.

"Like what?" he asked.

"Poverty can make a great picture," I said, as soon as the camera rolled.

"I never said that. You never heard me say that. Who said that?"

It was said by the great Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado. Bourke was quiet for a while and then for about five or six minutes, in a reflective and considered way, he spoke eloquently and passionately about his identification with the underdog in society, about compassion and conscience, about a search for light and wonder and beauty. When he finished, as though surprised with his response, he stood up and walked away alone and down towards the lake. That experience is etched in my memory and it's the concluding part of the film documentary to be seen on Arts Lives on Tuesday, May 1st.

My fascination with his work started back in 1967 when, as a hitchhiking student across Canada and the US, I arrived in Montreal to see Expo67, the great international fair titled "In a New World". As I approached the small Irish pavilion I feared the prospect of facing representative images of an Ireland of shamrocks, dancing colleens and rural idylls. Instead, I was taken aback when I saw, in the entrance, a black-and-white photograph which was the very opposite to that.

It showed a young girl hunched down and picking lumps of coal from a cobbled street near the gasworks, a sack propped onto an old pram beside her. This was The Pickaroon by Fergus Bourke.

It's a great photograph, a perfect composition of subject and form in a grey, grimy light. It's to be found in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art and was bought as international recognition of a unique sensibility and eye for the unexpected.

My admiration for the photographic work of this man continued through the various phases of his interests, whether seen in galleries, magazines or theatre foyers. I found them continuously challenging, searching, amusing and always honest. Our paths crossed personally and professionally over the years and I harboured the notion of making a film with him for many years. The opportunity never arose, until he told me that he had been invited to mount a 40-year retrospective of his work (1963-2003) in the Gallery of Photography in Temple Bar. We set to work.

We filmed as he cast a fresh eye over his work and talked of his adventures, his memories, the stories he associated with some of the classic images he produced. While the photographs were the focus and backbone of the film, Bourke was a very good talker indeed, and so the narrative thread revealed itself as he spoke. His quest, from the start, was to become an artist photographer and when he was the first such to be acknowledged and admitted as a member of Aosdána in 1980 it meant a great deal to him.

In an essay Fergus Bourke once wrote of how, as a young man, he fortuitously stumbled upon a copy of The Decisive Moment - Photography by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and realised that inside him was a photographer waiting to get to work.

"Each picture," he wrote "was a deceptively simple evocation of a street happening or incident captured in a fraction of a second within the borders of the classical golden mean rectangle, a rigorous organisation of the elements of the subject matter, a magical coming together of the relevant units, freezing a moment of life that as a statement would exist entirely for its own sake."

Is such photography an art form? "Yes!" he declared, "when it's in the hand of an artist!"

Initially using a small Leica camera, Fergus Bourke walked the streets of Dublin, travelled to the horse fairs and fleadh cheoils, to festivals in the villages of Ireland and to Traveller encampments. He used his eye, his hand and his heart to encounter "decisive moments that exist only for a fraction of a second in time and no more" and caught them, time and again. His archive is a unique documentary on social life in Ireland in the second half of the 20th century.

It is a special moment in the concluding part of the documentary when he speaks so beautifully about the value of his life's work for one reason - I did not film Fergus Bourke again.

Within a matter of months he was laid low with a serious illness and he died in October 2004. His death was a great blow to me personally. I had lost a friend but I completed the film during his illness and I hoped he'd have a chance to see my portrait of him before he died. I completed the rough cut on the morning he passed on. In retrospect, it has been a rare privilege to have known him and shown him as a special man before his light went out.

Fergus Bourke - In His Own Words, a film portrait by Art O'Briain/Moving Still Productions, is on Arts Lives, RTÉ 1, on Tuesday at 10.15pm