About the Photographer | Anselm Gallagher
Anselm was born in County Leitrim in the West of Ireland in 1960, until moving to the UK in 1987.
Anselm “Whilst working in Essex during the early days in England I purchased my first SLR camera, a Minolta x300, from a charity shop in Burnham on Crouch. My housemate explained its workings and I set about photographing all that was around me.
However, it was chance meeting with Henri Cartier Bresson at a fashionable gentleman’s club in London where he was a member and I was working, that set me on a different path and opened my eyes to the possibilities of photography. He was in London at that time for a Magnum exhibition, ‘In out Time’ ( I still have the poster) at the Hayward Gallery and I went along. It was an excellent event. To be fair I really didn’t know who Cartier Bresson was at the time but I soon began to amass quite a collection of books of his work.
The streets of London, particularly North West London, became my stomping ground and I also attended evening classes in photography and learned how to print black and white images. In 1994 I took a two year course in documentary photography at Stockport College and in total spent four years in Manchester where I took some of my more memorable images.
Although I still enjoy taking photographs I do not devote as much time to it as I did in the past due to other commitments. The 1990s was definitely a time when I was immersed fully in the art although the advances in technology allow me to now reach a much larger audience than could ever have been possible in the 1990s.
For now I continue with a project I began in the 1990s titled ‘Effort After Meaning’ in which I record memories from my past (or at least my version of the memories) through the medium of photography. Some of this work has already been shown at Mantos and at The Watershed in Bristol.”