Programme » Talk

Talk 19: A Light Evening

Kim Haughton

Exchange Dublin

11th July, 6:30 pm

A Light Evening is a series of open talks for everyone to show and discuss photographic work. The series will close on Sunday the 11th with a presentation by Kim Haughton on her work for NGO’s over the last years.

Under One Sky | Photographing the Developing World.

Kim Haughton is an award winning photographer & photojournalist. She has documented social and humanitarian issues in over twenty countries throughout her career so far, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Her work regularly appears in publications worldwide. Recently, she has been experimenting with documentary film making, earning her an award for her first short. She is a lecturer in documentary Photography at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin. She is represented by Via Visuals and Polaris Images.

Kim Haughton is one of Ireland’s leading photographers working today, documenting social and humanitarian issues affecting people across the world.

Of her decision to become a photojournalist, Kim says “I bought my first camera age 16 and after I left school, I studied photography in DIT. I was always reading newspapers and was fascinated by big spreads of images in the Sunday Times magazine and the London Independent. In Ireland, the Sunday Tribune was leading she way in terms of printing quality photojournalism. They used to print the most amazing double page spreads by Magnum photographers and I thought, I want to do that. So, I got a part time job in the Sunday Tribune, working in the darkroom and that was the start of it”

In 2001, Kim, teamed up with a journalist and they set out on self funded assignments to Ethiopia and Kenya where they covered a number of stories including the lives of Addis Ababa’s street children, the eradication of polio and the reasons behind the successes of long distance runners in the rift valley in Kenya. While self funding assignments was feasible in a time when newspapers were willing to pay well for content, times have changed and Kim will explain how this transition has affected her approach to the work and how funding needs to come from other sources in order to fulfill it. Many of her assignments since 2005 have been made with the assistance of NGO’s and largely in part to the existence of the Simon Cumbers Media Fund.

Simon Cumbers was an Irish freelance journalist and cameraman. He was killed after being shot by gunmen in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia while on assignment for the BBC in 2004. Simon had just moved into photojournalism before he died and it is very fitting that his spirit lives on through his family and their support of the fund that was set up in his name to support fellow photographers and journalists to tell stories that otherwise would remain untold. In 2009, Kim was one of three photographers who participated in Concern’s “Women of Concern” photographic project where she traveled to Ethiopia to cover gender based violence issues.

On returning from her assignment, which culminated in a successful exhibition at the Gallery of Photography in March 2010, Kim said “Capturing emotion and feeling in a photograph is what has always interested me the most. Despite their harrowing experiences, the strength and dignity of the Ethiopian women that I met is a testament to the power of the human spirit. I came away thinking how I got so much more from them in those terms than I could ever give”

Curated by PhotoIreland Festival

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