Thomas Pool: What can you tell us about yourself? How did you become interested in photography and what drives your practice?
Ruth Medjber: I became interested in photography from a very young age. My father was a travelling sales representative for camera manufacturers in Ireland, and my mother worked in a filter making factory. They weren’t photographers but they both worked in camera related fields. Growing up in the early 90s, we were fairly broke, working-class people, so often the cheapest option was for my father to bring me with him on work trips around Ireland. So, I was put in the back of the van, where I’d play with blower brushes and litmus paper, and had access to all sorts of amazing gear from a very young age. And my father would placate me, when I grew bored, with little pink and blue plastic toy cameras. And along the way, we’d stop in John Gunn’s or the Galway Camera Shop – very iconic Irish camera stores. He’d pop me up onto the counter and whoever was there, like John Gunn, would process my film for me from my toy cameras as a three-year old – which is great because John Gunn still processes my film now as a 38-year old!
But that’s kind of how I got started, and photography just became this part of my life that has never gone away – an early obsession that became an absolute passion and a dedication. It became my be all and end all – my identity. It’s very hard now to separate anything I do from photography. I will always be taking photographs, and I’ve kind of shot myself in the foot, really, because I can never do anything else. You know, I’ve never had a choice about what I wanted to be. I was always going to be a photographer, one way or another, whether I was good at it or not. And for a while there, I wasn’t good at it, but I had to get good at it.
TP: What equipment do you use? What do your editing and selection processes look like?
RM: I’ve always been a Nikon shooter. When I started, I used an SLR Nikon F55, which my dad chose for me. Once you’ve got one system on the go, you’re never really going to change because you start building up a collection of glass for those cameras. So, I’m a Nikon shooter to this day, which is great because I’m now an official ‘Nikon Creator’, which is a really nice deal where they give me free stuff – they’re lovely to me! It was a really organic, natural partnership to work with them.
When I’m touring with a band, and I’m shooting concerts, it’s quite different from when I’m shooting portraits at home. I use a three-lens system that I always have in my bag: 24-70mm, 12-24mm, and 70-200mm. Those are my three main lenses as a concert photographer that I use with my Z8 camera. I also use the same system on my D6 camera, because I’m a very reluctant mirrorless shooter. I still love to shoot with mirror, and I’m finding it very hard to transition. Of course, with the addition of video to my career these days, I’ve had to change things up a little bit – again, very, very reluctantly.
I also have a plethora of other cameras that I won’t get rid of! For parties, for socialising, just for the craic, when I’ve clocked off my real job and I’m just me again, I’ll use the Instax range. Every type of Instax and Polaroid that exists, I own.
When I’m shooting in work, for shows and everything, I would use Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop at the same time for edits. The turnaround is just so quick; you literally finish the show at 11pm and you’re supposed to have the images turned around within an hour. So, I get straight back on the tour bus and import into Lightroom, and then I might have shot three to five thousand images a night. So, I just make my selections really quickly, do some basic exposure adjustments, and then move onto Photoshop for any larger edits.
The things I get to spend a little more time on – my personal work, like my upcoming show ‘Her, Allure’ at Photo Museum Ireland (15 to 19 October) – involve a completely different process. It’s lovely and slow and detailed and meticulous and laborious in a great way; I can really take my time and mull over each image. I’ve been editing that show while I’ve been on the road with Hozier during his North America tour. I’ve been editing on my days off in hotel rooms, setting up my sketches for how I want the exhibition layout to look, and getting a real grasp on the scale and size by putting up neon tape, signs and images. The house-keeping staff probably thought I was deranged! But I just really needed that space to visualise how people are going to see it in the gallery. So those are my two extremely different workflows.
TP: As AI technology grows more ubiquitous, including Apple’s new AI photo editor tool, how do you think photographers will convey authenticity and originality to their audiences going forward?
RM: AI doesn’t worry me in that respect. I’ve always felt, as a photographer, that people are more concerned about my practice and livelihood than I am. I remember when camera phones became ubiquitous everyone said “Oh no, you’re going to be replaced!” But I was fine. So, with AI they’re saying “Oh no, your days are numbered!” But I use AI in my practice at times; I’m not afraid of it. I know exactly what it can and can’t do. But I think with regard to originality, the authenticity in my work comes from my subject matter and keeping the truth there.
I’m a portrait photographer; I photograph people – real people. When I started off, upon graduation from college, I tried every type of photography, including fashion photography. I was working with models, and it’s one of the only types of photography that I couldn’t get into, because I really felt the disconnect between me and the model. As I got older and more established, I realised that what I enjoyed most about photography was the act of representing a person’s character and unique personality. And that, to me, is what’s so crucial in my work. I don’t think that’s ever going to be replaced by AI.
TP: As a professional photographer, you’ve spent a considerable amount of time photographing concerts of famous musicians and bands such as St. Vincent, The Arctic Monkeys, Ed Sheeran, Billie Eilish, and Miley Cyrus, to name a few. Most recently, you’ve been on tour with Hozier photographing him and his concerts; what’s life like on the road with a famous musician and their entourage? How do you capture the excitement of the crowd and the musicians, while satisfying the press, the record labels, and social media platforms?
RM: Touring is amazing, but it’s also extremely difficult. It’s very, very hard. You’re catching me the day after I’ve just finished an 11-week tour and I’m sitting here and I’m very jetlagged, so I’ll give you a brutally real answer as to what touring is like.
It can be a very hard slog. It can be quite gruelling at times, but then it’s also this incredible adventure that you’re never going to experience in any other situation in your life. We’ve just done 11 weeks touring North America. We’ve been touring this show for 18 months now, across North America, South America, and Europe. We’re about to go to New Zealand and Australia. So, we’re covering a big chunk of the world. It is exciting. But then it’s also Groundhog Day because you’re going into venues, especially arenas, which all sort of look the same, no matter where you are in the world.
As the resident artist on tour, it’s my role to capture it, not only in a documentarian way, but also in an artistic way. Not only for social media and the record labels and the press, but also for the fans. I try to put myself in the shoes of 15-year old me, when I used to go to shows and line up at 6am to be the first kid at the barrier. I come from a place of being that fan, you know, and I still am. I want to see the show the way they see it and the way I used to see it. And that’s what’s really great about it. I detach from being the crew member and go back into being a fan. If you ever see me at a Hozier show, I lose my mind. I’m in it. I’m singing, I’m dancing. All the other crew members are laughing at me because they can all see me in the front row. I absolutely love it. And I have to love it, to get myself into that zone, you know?
The main thing is to give the fans something gorgeous to hang onto, whether they were there or not. I try to capture it for what it was: something special and intimate and curious and wonderful. Everything that Hozier tries to put out there, everything he’s tried to make with his show. That’s what I try to capture.
TP: Your Covid-era ‘Twilight Together’ series beautifully captured both the isolation and togetherness we collectively experienced during the pandemic. Your work exemplified the photographer’s role as both artist and documentarian. What does this duality look like, for you and your practice?
When I was creating ‘Twilight Together’, it was crucial for me to make sure I captured the reality of what was happening at the time, and to not not skim over anything. I felt it was a responsibility. When I realised the project was interesting to as many people as it was, when everyone started messaging me, wanting to be part of it, I knew it had potential to be something quite popular. It was then that I said, “Okay, I need to make sure that this is a fair representation of what’s going on.” The project became a book, and when I signed the book deal, I made sure that it wasn’t going to be a glossy, fluffy version of events, nor was it going to be, you know, overly dramatised either. I wanted to reach out to so many different members of the population, Irish people of all backgrounds and communities, and make sure that their experience was also represented. So, I looked at population statistics to see the different lives in Ireland, the demographics, cultures and communities. How many members are there of the traveller community? How many Black Irish people do we have? How many Muslim Irish people do we have? I wanted to make sure everyone had their fair share in this document.
I was quite meticulous about that because I grew up in Ireland in a mixed heritage family. My father’s from Africa, and he’s Muslim; my mother’s from Ireland, and she’s Catholic. I grew up with this duality in my own life, and I was never represented in art or media. And if my people were represented, it was always in a negative way. I didn’t want that to happen with this book. I reached out to different people and asked “What’s it been like for you?” I made sure to visit a Muslim family that I knew who were celebrating Eid on that day. And then I went and found a beautiful traveller family down in Cork. And they introduced me to all of their family members.
I made sure to hear people’s stories. So, the book not only features photographs of the families, but also the individuals. There are 150 different windows in the book, containing different scenarios, family situations, friendships, and so on. There are also 44 stories, and it’s in these stories that I tell people’s different versions of events. I think that’s kind of the documentarian side of me, that I just have to tell other people’s stories the way they’re told to me, as clearly as possible. It’s by my choice of topic and my style of work that it becomes art.
TP: You have an upcoming exhibition at Photo Museum Ireland, titled ‘Her, Allure’ (15 – 19 October 2024). What can you tell us about this new body of work and how it came to be?
‘Her, Allure’ was commissioned by Peugeot. I feel like artists in Ireland don’t talk about brand commissions enough; they’re a huge part of my existence. Peugeot came to me at the start of the year looking for a photographer who could conceptualise one word, and the word was ‘allure’. They were looking for a photographer who could just run away with the idea. They were very hands off and they gave me a lot of creative control.
Being an artist in Ireland in 2024 is quite hard because, unless you’re killing it on the international market and selling your prints or photographs for however much, it’s very hard to make a living. So, when chances like this come along to get fairly paid for my work, I will always consider them. I found them to be a decent group of people who respect what I do. They gave me the ability to hire people that I trusted for the project, so I was able to hire my friends who run a production company to do the video that goes alongside the project. We kept it very local, very Irish, and very artist driven.
When conceptualising the word ‘allure’, to me, I see it as the nomadic, carefree spirit that exists inside me, that makes me live the type of life that I do, which is very non-traditional. I love the life that I have, which is extremely free. I have no routine in my entire life. I’m not tied down. So, I thought of the ‘allure’ in me that, every so often, I just hear a little whisper on the wind going, “Come on, let’s go!” It’s just something in me that doesn’t like to settle down; I’m always going to be carried on to the next adventure, the next shoot.
I imagined ‘allure’ as personified by my friend MayKay, and I created this collection of photographs of her as this nomadic, fleeting spirit – a mythological siren, always calling you down the road. And there’s a bit of divilment in there as well, where she’s calling you and you know shouldn’t answer, but you will anyway. The images can be quite trippy at times, and people’s responses have been varied, to say the least. There are nine images in total, and I’ve tweaked them in places to pull the viewer in, to make them feel disconcerted and curious. We shot it over four days, which is incredibly quick to do a shoot like this. But due to time constraints with the Hozier tour, we had to do it in four days and pray for the weather – and we got the weather.
For ‘Her, Allure’, this is the first time I’ve ever photographed somebody who’s representing me. Which was a very strange thing to do. When I hired MayKay to play this character in the series, it wasn’t until about halfway through the editing process that I realised I had actually hired her to play myself. It’s something I’ve always thought about doing in my work, but I’ve never actually realised it, until I accidentally did it with this campaign.
I’m 38 years of age. I’m living this bananas lifestyle that is so different to any generation before me, especially as a woman. I’m privileged enough to do this because I made a decision a while back to remain child free in my life. So, I don’t have the traditional kind of ties of family life to anchor me to any particular point. What I saw, when editing the ‘allure’ shots, was my acceptance of the lifestyle that I’ve chosen. There was a lot of grown-up realisations when I was editing it. Hopefully people will get that sense of freedom when they see ‘allure’ for themselves and meet her in the gallery. It’s been absolutely amazing, having the freedom to go and do something completely different from what I’ve been doing for the last year and a half. Something so freeing and so open and so immensely broad as to capture ‘allure’.
Ruth Medjber is a professional artist and photographer. Her new exhibition ‘Her, Allure’ runs from 15 to 19 October 2024 at Photo Museum Ireland.
