Harry Thuillier Jr's photographs, like those of the US photographer, Francesca Woodman, have a strangely other-worldly, haunted quality. Like her, he died tragically young, aged just 33 and, with the benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to read premonitions of his own death into his strange, compelling images of ancient skulls and modern dreamers.
Thuillier was a far from neglected talent during his life. The response to his work was enthusiastic and heartfelt, his exhibitions did well. Yet he was a driven, nomadic spirit, impossible to pin down within the definition of something as prosaic as a "career", and the quality and distinctiveness of his vision are only likely to become fully apparent in retrospect. That is why the Gallery of Photography's survey of his work, from his earliest photographs until his death in 1997, which opens on Wednesday, is particularly welcome.
Thuillier, one of three brothers, was born in Dublin in 1964. His father, the athlete Harry Thuillier, was a fencing champion and Harry Jr followed in his footsteps, becoming Junior National Fencing Champion. Throughout his childhood, his ambition was to become a vet. He loved animals and worked at the zoo and in the veterinary college. But he knew that he didn't have the temperament to gain the necessary points to study veterinary medicine at third level, and after school, he set off to study photography at the Memphis Academy of Arts in the US.
His teacher there, Murray Riss, commented that he was, unusually, more interested in the evolution of a personal vision than commerce. After Memphis, he went on to the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. There he met Joel Peter Witkin, a photographer who was clearly a formative influence on his style. Witkin has, controversially, created a surreal universe of his own in his photographs, a dark, macabre realm, inhabited by cadavers and grotesques, bodyparts and rotting fruit.
"I don't like him," Thuillier recorded flatly, adding: "I like his prints." He remarked on the fact that all of Witkin's subject matter is real, "plucked from the morgue . . ." Thuillier had a passion for the real, and his images, garnered on endless, restless journeying, have the air of being snatched in extremis. They are things at the edges of the world, the fringes of experience.
Yet a comparison with Witkin is instructive for the way it reveals the relative gentleness of Thuillier's vision. His work, shot through with sad, dreamy melancholy, exudes compassion, never more so than when he took an old Panorama camera on a rusty Minsk motorbike on a trip through Vietnam.
The resultant prints, shown in 1997 in the last exhibition of his work seen during his lifetime, are exemplary documents of human empathy and compassion, and suggest new directions to be explored.
Long before that, after completing his studies in the US, he returned to Ireland in 1989. The following year, already used to restricted vision in one eye, he was the victim of an assault that came close to robbing him of his sight entirely.
One of a group of punks he was photographing off Grafton Street in Dublin took umbrage and lashed out at him with a broken bottle, badly gashing his face. After hours in surgery, he was left with hugely diminished vision in what had been his good eye. Thereafter he was understandably anxious that his sight might fail completely: "A real hard case to come to terms with," as he put it, with some understatement.
The trauma may also largely explain a period of heroin addiction that he had to struggle hard to overcome.
From 1993, he took up "the expensive and complex art" of platinum palladium printing, a difficult, painstaking process that dates from the very beginnings of photography, but one that offers the photographer incomparably beautiful surface textures, a sumptuous range of pearly tones and shimmering colour tints. Some of his best work, his extraordinary Fleurs du Mal and Of Night and Light series, employs the technique to great, magical effect, conjuring up a world as distinctive as Witkin's, but altogether Thuillier's own. These images share with Woodman's work the quality of being both firmly rooted in the everyday and quite other-worldly in effect, unexpectedly stretching the poetic, expressive possibilities of photography.
During 1997, the last year of his life, Thuillier was dogged by setbacks. An allergic reaction to treatment for a kidney infection left him debilitated. His relationship with his Italian girlfriend broke up. Emotionally fragile, he set off to Italy at the end of the year. On December 27th, waiting for a train in Milan railway station, he went for a beer and met someone. His body was discovered later in the underground area beneath the station. He had died of a massive overdose in circumstances that have never been convincingly explained.
Thuillier - A Retrospective Exhibition can be seen at the Gallery of Photography, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, June 14th - July 1st.
