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The Interview Liam Lyons has taken thousands of pictures, many of which now hang in famous places.
Life through a lens
In a career spanning over 50 years, Liam Lyons took thousands of pictures, many of which now hang in famous places The Interview Neill O'Neill
HE was awarded the first ever Fellowship of the Irish Professional Photographers’ Association, has seen his photographs hanging in no less places than The White House and Áras an Uachtaráin, and in a career spanning more than half a century has enjoyed a level of success seen by few people in any profession. Yet, Liam Lyons’ career as a photographer was never planned. “Photography came to me accidentally. I started taking pictures in 1955 in Westport. I would have been a teacher and had passed some of my teacher exams but I had a serious health problem and had to convalesce after brain surgery for a year. There wasn’t a lot of photographers back then, but my brother Jackie had started it. He was working as a compositor in The Mayo News at the time and I would help him. I began by taking pictures at the dance halls in Achill. They used to love seeing us coming and getting into the paper. The pictures cost one and six pence to buy.” With his career in education side-tracked, Liam had inadvertently set out on what would be an illustrious path to success. “Someone hired my brother to do a wedding and he couldn’t, so I did it. I remember thumbing a lift to Newport for the wedding and back that day, and other work quickly came along. “It was exciting and interesting and developed so well that I just kept going. As time moved into the sixties I began working with the Connaught Telegraph and John McHale, who had great ideas. That built my profile as I used to do all the social dinners in Castlebar and my wedding business really took off.” Liam quickly found that he was in demand from national newspapers and in a time when television sets were largely unheard of in many parts of the country, journalists from Ireland and abroad were regularly commissioning him to illustrate their articles. “I got on very well with Terry O’Sullivan from the Irish Press Group, and he would come down to Westport regularly to do stories. Des Moore was another one, and to get on the back page of the Sunday Independent at the time was like getting on the Late Late Show today. Through this my reputation grew and grew, and next thing I was well-known and had a huge wedding business. I was also doing social work at night and football every Sunday and I was working with The Farmers’ Journal. They’d send me down an article and I’d travel to where the story was and illustrate it through photographs.” Around this time Liam met and fell in love with and married the manageress of the Central Hotel, Mabel Hayes, a native of west-Cork. The first of their two daughters soon followed and with a thriving business and family all operating out of their home in Rosbeg, it was now time to set up an office in town. “I got married in 1964 and used to do work at home in Rosbeg in a dark room I had there. Then my first daughter was born and it became crowded, so I got a loan at 18.5 per cent and bought a little place on Bridge Street next door to O’Grady’s Newsagents. After nine years I moved across the street to a much bigger premises and it was here that things really took off. I stayed there for over 20 years. “I had many contacts and was doing a lot of portraits but I also began doing landscapes because I love the area around Westport. Sure, we are living in paradise here. I had a lot of room to display these in the new building and they began to sell very well. There was a great tourist trade back then and the photographs ended up going in all directions around the world. This time was the high point of Liam’s career, with 140 weddings a year and three girls in the darkroom printing, with albums stacked from floor to ceiling ready for posting. “I remember when it was getting busy, Ann Kilcoyne came from the Vocational School to work with me during the summer holidays. She stayed 24 years and was a wonderful asset and great with customers. Mabel and myself couldn’t have got through those hectic years without her.” In 1968 Liam took up flying, but with a full diary every day he had no time to study for his full pilot’s licence. His adventurous spirit then turned to sailing in the seventies, before he took the first of many overseas landscape exhibitions to the USA in 1984 with his childhood friend Noel Quirke – who processed all Liam’s images in his Dublin photo lab. “So many people used to come into me on Bridge Street and I set up a network of contacts all over the world, which was something that benefited me greatly when it came to going overseas. I used contacts in Bord Fáilte and they arranged an exhibition in a gallery in New York, and as a result I was approached by an agent and he ordered four sets of the exhibition – all landscapes from the west of Ireland – which were brought to 26 cities around the US and all sold. “I had another exhibition in Wannamakers in central Philadelphia, which was a fabulous venue. It sold very well and I was on live television and met the Mayor, Bill Greene, whose grandmother, it turned out, came from Kilasser in Swinford. That was organised in one phone call by Westport man Austin McGreal, much to the amazement of my contact in Philadelphia who told me it would take nine months to arrange. “Everything about those trips worked out for me. Even when one of our flights with North West Orient was cancelled at the last minute, the late Ray Moran from Mill Street – who was a captain with Aer Lingus – brought us down and helped us load the exhibition into the cargo hold of an Aer Lingus jumbo. We ended up flying first class to the States even though we had bought the cheapest tickets. And I met Eileen Prose – a famous chat show host from Boston – in the first class cabin and ended up going on her ‘Good Day America’ show.” America became a success for Liam with luminaries such as Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett among those who ended up with his pictures. Several years later he was at home watching Tip O’Neill speaking in the White House on RTÉ news when he saw one of his landscapes hanging behind him on the wall. Amazingly, he later saw a copy of the same picture hanging in Mary Robinson’s office in Áras an Uachtaráin, on television. Awards and accolades began rolling in. There were several Kodak Awards, an IPPA Presidential award, an Associateship in portraiture from the IPPA followed by the first Fellowship ever accorded to an Irish photographer, and a Press Photographer of the Year Award in 1981 for a picture essay of Clew Bay. However, Liam always had a desire to change the way people viewed his profession. “There was no college when I started and no way of learning. It was all trial and error. The way people viewed the profession concerned me and I always looked to bring this up. I always tried to be innovative. I was young and enthusiastic and was always full of ideas. “There is a different approach to the profession and a lot of computer work nowadays. It is a changed art. There was nobody to help me when I was starting out, but I have never had a problem helping out or giving advice to any professional photographer.” Liam Lyons was undoubtedly a photographer years ahead of his time, but as the years rolled on he felt it was time to close his camera shutter for good. “I was in Market Lane for four years after Bridge Street. I began downsizing in the later years. I photographed my last bride in 1993 but had stopped taking bookings from 1990. I was always booked two or three years ahead. Weddings used to be midweek up until the eighties, and I was often doing seven a week. These also led to other business like communions, and I once did 86 separate communion portraits in one day. It was impossible to keep it up forever and I found I was doing second generation weddings and felt I was getting tired and wasn’t able to give it my best. I was also afraid that someone would come in and say that they wanted me to do their wedding because I had done their grandmother’s!” The last wedding Liam worked at was in Tourmakeady, and photographer Tommy Eibrand tagged along to document what he felt was a historic occasion. A picture he took that day of Liam bending down to fix the bride’s dress – which he called ‘Finishing Touches’ – won him a national award. Liam was born on Peter Street and now lives on the West Road, a mere stone’s throw from where he spent his formative years. He maintains an archive of every picture he has taken in the past 53 years – thousands of photographs – and meets regular requests for old photos from around the globe. People often ask him to write his memoirs and having covered ‘everything that could have happened for four decades’ his mind, like his archive, is by his own admission, a record of social history. For now though he is happy to enjoy life with his two daughters Fidelma and Fionnuala living nearby. He and Mabel also have almost daily visits from their two grandchildren – five-year-old Leon and 18-month-old Lucy – to enrich the autumn of their lives. “A good picture,” he says “is one that you still love as years go by. It withstands the test of time.” The man himself, and his work, are testament to this ethos.
Landscape photographs are still available from Liam Lyons. Contact 087 2412362
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David Clarke impressed for Ballina Stephenites in their Mayo GAA Senior Club Football Championship final against Westport in MacHale Park, Castlebar. Pic: Sportsfile
Moy Davitts and Kilmeena played out a thriller in the Mayo GAA Intermediate Club Football Championship final in MacHale Park, Castlebar. Pic: Conor McKeown
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