The Pádraig Grant Gallery

26/10/2025

Probably the best portrait I've ever made.

Seán MacBride, Nobel Peace Prize winner, was an Irish Clann na Poblachta politician who served as Minister for External Affairs from 1948 to 1951, Leader of Clann na Poblachta from 1946 to 1965 and Chief of Staff of the IRA from 1936 to 1937. He served as a Teachta Dála from 1947 to 1957

This photograph was made backstage at an anti-nuclear public meeting at The Talbot Hotel, Wexford in 1988 shortly before he died.
Photo © Pádraig Grant

20/10/2025

07/10/2024

From my photo-essay 'The Funeral of Badea Marin'.
I was living in a small rural Romanian village just after the fall of Ceausescu - 35 years ago this December!
I was asked by the deceased man's family to photograph his funeral. To this day I think it is my best photo essay.

I would commute into the cities and around the region to cover demonstrations; the hard news, and the mood of the country; the soft news. I was accompanied by my fixer and translator, Valentina Stan. My photographs from this period, and even some my own correspondence, were published in The Sunday Tribune, Independent and Press. Those were the days!

Photograph © Pádraig Grant

05/10/2024

Tripoli, Lebanon 2001
© Pádraig Grant

14/09/2024

Border Guards at the Serbian (then Yugoslav) border with Romania, early 1990
Photo © Pádraig Grant

06/09/2024

Crescent Quay, Wexford
1987 © Pádraig Grant

05/09/2024

I usually show the 'busier' version of this photograph; it's exactly the same as this but with the addition of the early morning Rosslare to Dublin train trundling along it. This is the other photo I shot on that glorious morning back in summer 1988.

!Nerd alert!

The camera was a YashicaMat 124G twin lens reflex and on Kodak Tri-x, developed in Microdol-x.
I pre-exposed the film, taking it up to threshold, to achieve deeper shadow detail. The early morning sunlight meant a very contrasty morning and as one "exposes for the highlights and develops for the shadows" this was the best technique to achieve a long tonal scale.

End of nerd alert!

'The Woodenworks' 1988
Photograph © Pádraig Grant