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Medium: Acrylic screen print on Somerset paper.
Good To Know: Rare, unframed, stored flat in humidity controlled art storage facility, condition report available upon request.
Asking Price: Excludes international shipping and applicable import duties / charges. Please contact our gallery to obtain a shipping quote. Delivery within Singapore is free.
Arty-Fact: British-American Pop artist Russell Young is known for his compelling, larger-than-life silkscreen paintings appropriated from history and popular culture. Like pop artists past and present, Russell reinvents sometimes brutal images as a narrative on social, political and cultural dynamics.
“Battle of the Bogside” Photographer Recalls A Defining Moment of his Career
Paddy Coyle [1956 – 2020] was aged 13 when he was photographed in Bogside, Londonderry, wearing a gas mask and holding a petrol bomb. The image was taken in 1969 by Clive Limpkin, making the front cover of newspapers and magazines worldwide.
British photojournalist and writer Clive Limpkin [1937 – 2020] took the photo during what became known as the Battle of the Bogside, three days of rioting in 1969 viewed by many as the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Speaking to the BBC, fifty years after the photograph was taken, Clive Limpkin said he had only taken one shot of the teenager.
“Suddenly, there was this 13-year-old boy in the picture. I think I got one snap of him, and you don’t generally know if you’ve got a good picture, but I knew then I wasn’t going to beat that, and I never got a better picture.”
Pulitzer prize winning photographer Cathal McNaughton said the photo of Paddy Coyle “is more than just a snapshot in time; it evokes emotions in people.
“When I look at this picture, I can hear the thoughts and the chaos. I can see that this young fellow is standing in a street covered in rubble. It brings you to that time and place and why it lives in the collective memory of the masses.
“You’ve got the petrol bomb, you’ve actually got a badge of the island of Ireland on it, it places the picture exactly, and this oversized gas mask that adds an almost sinister element to the picture, almost a scary addition, and the clothes, the leather jacket that places it in its time as well.”
Source: “Paddy Coyle: Man from iconic ‘boy in the mask’ photo dies”, BBC, 2020
