As well as a photographer, Vince is also the Birmingham promotions wizard for the The Gleneagle Hotel in Killarney, South West Ireland.

So if you see one of these flyers for the Tour Killarney package holiday in your local pub or club, you now know that it was Vince who put it there!

To save you from squinting, you can also download the two-sided flyer as a PDF by clicking on the link below:

Tour Killarney -pdf

I really like it when a picture tells its own story, and the above photograph really does that for me.  The girl all dressed up and ready to dance, her concerned parents, a First Aider applying an ice-pack to her ankle.  Did she get to perform in the Fies (Irish dancing competition, pronounced ‘fesh’) at the Matthews Academy of Irish Dancing in Coventry on 11th Nov 2006?  It’s a question I ask myself every time I look at this image.

A slideshow of all of the photographs Vince took at the Fies is below:

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.