In the era when anyone can take a picture on their phone, the art of professional portraiture has become even more special. Especially when those photographic portraits are shot in analogue form, on film. English-born photographer Steve Pyke has recently completed a project that was four decades in the creation: a collection of portraits of 107 Irish writers.
The result is both a striking book, Scribendi, Portraits of Irish Writers 1985-2025, and an upcoming exhibition at Photo Museum Ireland at Meeting House Square in Dublin.
“The first portrait I took was of Neil Jordan in 1985 in London, and the last one was of Mary Morrissy this year,” he says.
Pyke, who is now approaching 70 and lives in New Orleans, has worked as a professional photographer for decades, including a 15-year stint at the New Yorker magazine, possibly one of the highest-profile jobs in the magazine industry. He has photographed a wide range of famous faces, from Shane MacGowan to the Dalai Lama.
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Pyke was once assigned to photograph the famous deconstructionist Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas, for a profile. The magazine suggested three possible approaches. One, photograph Koolhaas in New York, where a project of his was under construction; two, in Porto, Portugal, at Casa de Musica, a completed project; or at a site in China where the project was yet to be built.
“I chose Porto,” says Pyke. The New Yorker paid for Pyke, Koolhaas and an assistant to Pyke to fly to Portugal. There was a further assistant on the ground there. I ask how many pictures of Koolhaas subsequently ran in the magazine.
“One.”
The idea for Scribendi came about when Pyke started looking through his archives in recent years. “I already had about 30 portraits of Irish writers.” He contacted Anthony Farrell of Lilliput Press, who commissioned the project. Thus began the process of travelling around the country at different times, to photograph another 70 plus writers. “I made sure I read at least one of their books.”
Some of the photographs are in black and white, some in colour, and some in colour on what Pkye describes as “unstable stock”. This is old colour film, and the resulting portraits, such as the one of Gavin McCrea, have a distinctly retro aura to them, due to the saturated colours.
Faces loom and pulse from the pages, some as if appearing in dreams; others seem to be vanishing into some place we cannot see. All command the eye. Among the writers portrayed are Claire Kilroy, Bernard MacLaverty, Disha Bose, Mike McCormack and Christine Dwyer Hickey.
Pyke asked each writer three questions, one of which was when they first believed in something they’d written. I ask him the same question about his photographic work.
“It took a while before I realised it was something instinctive in me to do,” he says. “You cannot capture exactly what you see. You are always part of a second away. A portrait is a recording of a meeting, between two people: the camera is recording what is going on between those two people.”
Scribendi: Irish Writers 1982-2025 by Steve Pyke is published by Lilliput Press. A selection of his portraits will be on view at the Photo Museum Ireland, Meeting House Square, October 9th-November 2nd.
