It’s been so long since I posted a picture up here. I have some really interesting ones that I have done recently but only very slowly getting around to processing, scanning and posting them. Last night I was shooting The Gloaming from the side of the stage in Vicar Street and two weeks ago I was down in Cork photographing The Spook Of The Thirteenth Lock in Triskel Christchurch. The one above though is from the beginning of April and is Si Schroeder playing at the Beyond The Bookshelf micro-festival which takes place behind Connolly Books on Essex Street in Temple Bar. Connolly Books was established by members of the Communist Party of Ireland (history of the bookshop here) and stocks the city’s widest selection of Marxist and left-leaning literature. As far as I can figure out, Essex Street was also the location of Dublin’s long-gone occult/sci-fi/comics bookshop The Alchemists Head. I have dim memories of venturing down there as a teenager trying to find Harlan Ellison books, long before Temple Bar was turned into the country’s largest entertainment complex.
Anyway, you would never know it from the street, or even from inside the shop, but out the back of Connolly Books is a fully equipped state-of-the-art professional theatre space, The New Theatre, built by Mick Wallace in 2007. The Beyond The Bookshelf festival runs here once a year and is really three nights of gigs – some of which are in the theatre space, and some in the bookshop itself. This year they had Duke Special, Si Schroeder, The Pale and many more. I went along the night that Si Schroeder was playing and as well as taking some of the usual balcony-position shots, I set up the camera on the side of the stage and took some from that angle too. The photograph above is one of these. Because I was sitting on the stage and consequently feeling self-conscious I wasn’t taking notes so I don’t know how long the exposure was or what song it was. But it’s obviously the one where Mark plays guitar. I have some others from the festival that I will post in due course so stay tuned …
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Traces Of The Real 