Artist Statement Prof Colin Bradley

Colin Bradley – accidental artist

Photography is an art form ideally suited to the artistically gauche.  There are lots of technical aspects which allow one to pretend that the camera is only a tool and that you are not making art at all but just doing something procedural.  As a photographer I don’t see myself as necessarily being creative, as such. 

I merely capture what I see that has been created by others – nature, people, the built environment – and present it for consumption or contemplation.  But in choosing what to present and what not to present and how to present it I may provoke a response in you and I endeavor to provide you with a glimpse into the inner me.  And that, I suppose, does make me a creative person after all – a sort of accidental artist.

Artist's Biographical Sketch

Colin was born in the village of Fintona near Omagh in County Tyrone.  He is a medical graduate of Trinity College Dublin.  After internship in the Meath Hospital, Dublin, he undertook general practice training on the vocational training programme in Cork. 

During this training he worked in the, then, Cork Regional Hospital (now Cork University Hospital), the Erinville Maternity Hospital and in Our Lady's (Psychiatric) Hospital before going on to complete general practice training with Dr Harry Casey and colleagues in Mallow.  He then moved to the UK where he first became a lecturer in general practice at the University of Manchester and, subsequently, senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham.  In 1997 he returned to Cork to become the first professor of general practice in UCC.

He is married to Mary (Davis), a medical social worker in the Mercy University Hospital.  They have three children Phelim (1st year Physics student at UCC), Maeve (5th year pupil) and Niall (6th class pupil).

Colin was an avid member of his school photographic society in St McNissi's College, Co. Antrim but his attention to this hobby lapsed when he encountered (and embraced) the heady distractions of Dublin, as an undergraduate.  He continued more as a 'snapper' at social and family gatherings for the next several decades until acquiring a digital single lens reflex camera in about 2004.  The facility for creative control afforded by digital photography has spurred him into a return to photography as an artistic pursuit.

This is his first exhibition.