February 4, 2010 by Nicky Getgood

I first met the photographer Vince Thompson when he took this photo of me at Filum Night on 25th January 2010 (I’m the one that looks like a startled rabbit). Filum Night is an Irish film night I’ve been putting on at The Spotted Dog, Digbeth every other Monday for a couple of years now, but this was an extra special occasion because we were being filmed watching The Irishmen for a documentary BBC Inside Out were making about the film-maker Philip Donnellan.
This picture appeared in The Harp and The Irish World, for whom Vince has been taking pictures of Irish culture in the West Midlands since 1987. I suggested to Vince it might be nice to get his very interesting library of photographs online and he agreed, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. So a couple of days later we met for a cup of tea in The Irish Centre – I went though options like Flickr and Vince showed me some of his photographs. Vince had quite a few stories to tell whilst he was taking me through the images, and I soon realised that these stories are just as important as the photographs.
Last Thursday I saw Vince again and we went through some CD’s, some of which have been uploaded to the new Vince Thompson Photography Flickr stream. Armed with Nick Booth’s Zoom Q3 recorder, I managed to record some of the things he had to say about them. Nick has very kindly offered to go through this audio with me, to see what can be done with it.
So there we have it. This is hopefully the first of many posts featuring Vince’s images of Irish culture in England, and the stories he has to tell about them. Vince’s archive is digital to around 2003, photographs taken before then are stored as negatives. Any advice anyone has to offer about transferring the negatives to digital would be much appreciated.