Mick Ryan | Photographer

is a graduate in Fine Art of the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork, Ireland. He lives in Shanghai, China, with his wife and daughter where he runs a very successful photography studio. He has developed an international reputation as an art photographer alongside a highly regarded commercial practice. He is a member of the Royal Photographic Society and the Adobe Photography Directory. In 2007 he was a finalist in the American Photo magazine’s Image of the Year competition and he was named as Photographer of the Year by the Shanghai Daily. In 2008 he was named as Still Life Photographer of the Year and Portrait Photographer of the Year in the Black and White Photography magazine based in the United Kingdom. His work has been exhibited widely and recent exhibitions include the 2008 Royal Photographic Society Members’ Exhibition, a joint exhibition at 3 on the Bund, Shanghai (2008) and the International Projected Image Exhibition which was organised by the the Royal Photographic Society and toured throughout the United Kingdom in 2007. ‘Fables’ 2008 was his first exhibition in Ireland. This was followed with a major one person exhibition in the Don Gallery, Shanghai.

“The influences behind my work are diverse but mostly have their roots in my childhood, the actual one and the imagined one: the version my child’s mind believed were happening. I loved Victorian literature such as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Wind in the WIllows, especially illustrated editions. The BBC ran programs in those days which were frequently adaptations of Victorian era stories frequented by ghosts and strange dreams and populated by anthropomorphic creatures. Rather than quaint and cute those stories were frequently surreal and dark and infinitely more imaginative than today’s pop culture children’s’ drama. Images from traditional fairy tales also have remained with me since my childhood, not the sanitised versions mostly printed now, but the original allegorical European tales that were written in an age when very few people could read so they were written to be understood by child and adult on two different levels. They were often scary and creepy but for all the right reasons.”

– Michael Ryan