Anselm Gallagher was born in County Leitrim, in the west of Ireland, in 1960, where he lived until he moved to the UK in 1987. He purchased his first SLR camera, a Minolta x300, from a charity shop in Burnham-on-Crouch. His housemate explained its workings, and Anselm set about taking pictures of everything around him. A chance meeting with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson at a fashionable gentleman’s club in London further opened his eyes to photography.

In 1994, he took a two-year course in documentary photography at Stockport College and spent four years in Manchester, where he captured some of his most memorable images. Anselm continues to work on a project he began in the 1990s titled ‘Effort After Meaning’, in which he records memories from his past (or at least his version of the memories) through the medium of photography.