The Times We Lived In: Folly that – painterly artist wins plaudits for snapper

We don’t like to brag . . . oh, all right then, we do like to brag sometimes.

And if ever there was a picture worth bragging about, it’s surely this one. It’s one of the pictures that won the title of Press Photographers Association of Ireland Photographer of the Year in February 2002 for Brenda Fitzsimons, the first woman ever to take the top prize in that competition’s history.

Astute readers will have noticed that it's also a colour photograph. We don't often use those in this slot, our bread and butter being black and white and rescued from the dark depths of our archive. But if ever there was an excuse to use colour – well, the use of colour in this study of the painter Camille Souter is just so danged subtle. Painterly wouldn't be too big a word for it.

Now in her 80s, and more than 70 when the photo was taken, Souter has never encouraged visitors into her studio. Hence those somewhat forbidding doors, open just a chink to give us a glimpse of the Mayo-based artist at work in a room she called “The Folly” on Achill Island.

The picture makes something special of the doors themselves. Every scratch, hole and mark in the wood is visible, especially on the inside edge of the right-hand door, which hasn’t been painted (Newsflash: even painters don’t paint the inside edges of their doors, folks), and whose proximity to the camera is almost dizzying.

Behind the painter, patches of discolouration on a whitewashed wall are themselves suggestive of an abstract expressionist painting. The empty fireplace and the newspapers on the floor carry a more down-to-earth message about the dogged, unglamorous daily life of an artist. It’s the artist herself who provides a joyful splash of colour. Perched on a makeshift chair and swathed in an oversized fleece, her trademark beret on her head, her winter clothing offers a rich palette of royal red and purple. She might be a medieval monk, a bird of paradise – or a figure in a Vermeer interior.

These and other Irish Times images can be purchased from: irishtimes.com/photosales

A new book, The Times We Lived In, with more than 100 photographs and commentary by Arminta Wallace, published by Irish Times Books, is in bookshops now, priced €19.99.