Politicians are a tricky lot to cover as a photographer.
How does one convey some sense of personality, when the whole machinery of a political shop is basically designed to produce a smooth, controlled and fundamentally frictionless media event?
The worst outcomes are unfortunately very imaginable in the minds of many political operators: six o’clock career ending bulletins, invoking Veep-like gaffes, pinging around the internet in perpetuity.
Unfortunately for us, this increasingly robust stage management creates a bubble that is hard to pierce most of the time; it is difficult to get a glimpse behind the façade in daily rounds of press conferences and programme launches.
What a photojournalist is constantly looking out for with political coverage is not some embarrassing gaffe – although they do happen – but rather the revelation of something authentic, not a small task these days (and to be fair, this could be interpreted as a good or bad thing, depending on who you ask). This is where a general election canvass comes into play: the tight grip of control meets the unpredictable contours of reality, known as the public.
There were a variety of stops planned for the first day of a ride-a-long with Taoiseach Simon Harris’s campaign bus in mid-November. Canvassing at Dublin City University’s main campus, walkthroughs of Capel Street’s shops and pubs, and visits further afield in Raheny, Dublin 5.
And while the public certainly held forth at these stops, in both predictable and unpredictable ways, the one thing that struck me about the Taoiseach himself was how quickly he moved. It was no joke: the entourage of security, political staff and news media had to hustle to keep up, and if you turned around, he was off in another direction already and, alas, you were sadly out of position. From the start to finish he moved swiftly, and sometimes was running, even late in the day.
The Fontaines DC play “Starburster” to close their biggest and final homecoming show at 3Arena in Dublin for the tour of their fourth album, Romance. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times
Members of the press watch the MV Shingle, a seized former smuggling ship, preparing to be sunk in Killala Bay to create Ireland’s first artificial reef. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds play Dublin’s 3Arena on 12 November 2024 for the “Wild God” tour. Photo: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times
Yehia Ak Hamdo (9) walks to the classroom at the Makani centre in an informal tented settlement in Saadnayel, in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley. His father was killed after he returned to the family’s Syrian farm in 2009, leaving his mother and siblings struggling to survive. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times
Boy George and Culture Club perform at the 3Arena in Dublin. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times
Vincent Talbot greets Caroline Whelan at the Friends of the Elderly Ireland annual Christmas party at their Bolton Street location in north Dublin. Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times
The 2 Johnnies arrive on aerials to perform their podcast to a massive crowd at the 3Arena in Dublin, Ireland. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times
Seamus Howell, with Hickey’s Fabrications, puts the finishing touches on the installation of “The Dandelion Clocks” sculptures by artist Remco de Fouw at the new Children’s Hospital in Dublin 8. The sculptures feature prisms which refract light and project rainbows into the building when aligned with the sun at certain times of the year. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times
White-tailed sea eagles, some weighing as much as 6 kilos, are fitted with satellite tags at a site in Kerry so they can be monitored on a daily basis. The White-tailed Sea Eagle reintroduction project is a joint initiative between the National Parks and Wildlife Service of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Golden Eagle Trust in collaboration with the NorskInstitutt for Naturforskning (NINA) and the Norwegian Ornithological Society. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times
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