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DESIGN QUEER HEARTS RUN FREE A conversation with
Niamh Barry about the female gaze, crowdfunding a solo exhibition, and her upcoming photobook. “My personal work revolves around exploring queer topics,” Niamh Barry tells me, taking a first sip of her flat white. “I also do street photography and portraits of fellow creatives in Dublin. I’d say my work is very soft and personal, regardless of whether the photographs are for myself or for a client.” While Niamh has been working professionally for just over a year, a love for visual art was always in her nature. “When I was younger I used to make stopmotion Lego movies, recreate scenes from The Hunger Games, and write my own scripts,” she laughs. As a teenager, she stumbled across film photography videos on YouTube. “When I saw their work, I was like, ‘that’s the feeling I want my images to have. That’s how they look in my head.’” While studying in Trinity, she decided to buy a broken secondhand film camera and fix it up. “Something told me it was worth investing in,” she smiles, reminiscing. “I still use it today.” “The summer after my second year, most of my friends went on J1s and I moved home to Cork. I felt a bit stuck and lost so I started taking photos.” After a few months of practice, she decided to submit her 56 favourite shots to Dublin University Photography Association’s bi-monthly exhibition. “The feedback was insane,” she says. “People were really supportive and encouraging. It was the first time I felt like I had found ‘my people’ in Trinity.” The society and the support system that came with it further nurtured her love of the medium, inspiring her to start a photography Instagram. During her third year, Niamh was studying abroad in Boston and visited New York city with her camera in tow. The shots she captured reflect how inspiring she found the city. Shot on Kodak Gold, the collection depicts a sun-dappled Coney Island, vintage cars backed by sprawling city buildings, and neon-lit launderettes at night. With her time in the USA cut short by the pandemic, she decided to do a print sale of the images on her Instagram and was blown away by the support. “My mum and I were frantically trying to post everything out to people. We were like, holy shit! This actually could be something.” In the summer of 2020, during a brief respite from lockdown, she planned a trip to visit friends in Dublin. “In Cork I felt really disconnected from the queer community. I decided to do a call-out online to see if anyone was around for me to take their portrait.” Once again, the responses were overwhelming. “I think I shot around 15 or 20 people, but I could have kept going if I had more time and money.” The project became Queer Hearts of Dublin, a portrait series documenting the many facets of queer identity in the city. Crucially, she included a selfportrait. “At the time I wasn’t really out. Putting my photo in was my official way of coming out to the world as a queer woman.” As we chat, I’m intrigued by the role that social media has played in her career. At 23, Niamh is part of the generation of creatives who learned, honed and shared their skills online – particularly during the standstill of the pandemic. Like many other Gen-Z artists, Instagram proved fundamental to growing her profile, selling prints, and finding subjects for her photographs. “Instagram definitely helped me make things happen more quickly. I also have no patience,” she grins. “So when I get an idea, I need to go for it.” In January 2022, Niamh began thinking about her