Fergus Bourke

• Name — Fergus Bourke • Born — 31 July 1934 • Birthplace — Bray, County Wicklow, Irish Free State • Died — 8 October 2004 • Place of death — Ireland • Education — Presentation College Bray • Occupation — photographer • Years Active — 1960s–2004 • Known for — street scenes, photo-journalism, portraiture, black-and-white photography

Bourke was born in Bray in 1934 to Eileen (Eibhlín) Bourke (née Somers) and Thomas Bourke (Tómas de Búrca), who was related to Brendan Behan, Kathleen Behan and Peadar Kearney. His younger brother Brian Bourke was a noted painter. Fergus spent some of his childhood in County Wexford, then attended Presentation College Bray. After that he worked a variety of jobs, and was a stuntman in the film King of Kings (1961), filmed in Spain where Bourke was working, as an English teacher.

On returning to Dublin, Bourke was at a party and picked up a copy Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment (Images à la sauvette), which caused him to develop an interest in black-and-white photography. An exhibition at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in 1968 led to his work becoming known in the US; the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought seven of his pictures for its permanent collection. Bourke was renowned as a photographer of Dublin street scenes in the 1960s, depicting the tenements and children's street culture. He worked a photo-journalist, documenting poverty in the 1970s. He was also a portraitist, and documented all major productions in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin between 1970 and 1995. Bourke was elected to the Irish association of artists, Aosdána, in 1981. He held a major retrospective at the Gallery of Photography in Temple Bar, Dublin in 2003, and later in the Galway Arts Centre.

He married Maureen O'Connor, an Irish-American from Maplewood, New Jersey, in 1963; they had four children. They lived in Sandymount, Dublin from 1963 until 1992, when they moved to Connemara in County Galway. Bourke died in 2004; his widow donated his remaining prints to the National Photographic Archive.