Remember how impossible it was to get a hair cut during lockdown? Afterwards for some time the barber or hair dresser would have to wear a mask while grooming your hair. This was in February 2022, when we were still paranoid about COVID-19.

Mask pulled down to the chin, cigarette on the go is the small, very 2022 contradiction I couldn’t resist framing.

A young woman blew the smoke from a vape into the air as I walked past.

A calico cat sits in the sun in Playa Blanca, Lanzarote on a warm January afternoon in 2017. The charity, Freddy’s Cat House, erected the feeding house you can see in the background.

Two pigeons, one pile of grain, and a standoff that never became a fight. There was plenty of food for everyone on Sullivan’s Quay, Cork.

I was standing on Emmett Place with my neck cricked at an awkward angle, trying to work out where the real sky ended and the reflected one began. Two people passed by and I’m sure they might have wondered what I was photographing with my head almost stuck to the window. Well, I’d noticed the…

The red building does the heavy lifting in this one. Squat, breeze-block, with a corrugated shutter rusting at its own pace and a smear of white graffiti for company. It used to be a shop. Hard to picture now, with the shutter pulled down for good and the paint going chalky, but at some point…

I shot this on Princes Street in Cork back in 2016, and I had it filed in my head all this time as a Starbucks-versus-Starbucks gag. The wellness sermon in the window was contradicted by the Frappuccino in the hand. Turns out the window belongs to Rocket Man, a salad and juice bar, which means…

The man in the blue jacket has both hands on the jockey’s left boot, mid heave, and number 37 is halfway between earth and saddle. It’s neither one place nor the other. I love the awkward physics of a leg-up. It looks ungainly until you remember it’s the only sensible way to get a small,…

I caught this one on a warm Saturday night in Katowice a few years ago. Somewhere on the Mariacka strip where every other doorway is a bar and the pavement is essentially a parade route. Five women in a loose flying-V, the bride-to-be in white on the right with a tiara, a veil and a…

Foz do Lizandro is one of those beaches where the Atlantic doesn’t let you forget it’s the Atlantic. Even on a bright spring day, the surf comes in heavy and the water is properly cold. I caught this little scene from up the beach: mum framing the wave on her phone, dad watching, holding a…