Perry Ogden


Perry Ogden is a British fashion and documentary photographer, and film director, based in Dublin. He is interested in Traveller culture.
Ogden has published three books of photography, Pony Kids, 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio and Paddy and Liam. Some of his work is held in the Irish [Museum of Modern Art] and the National Portrait Gallery, London.
His film Pavee Lackeen: The Traveller Girl is a drama about Irish Travellers. It won Best Film at the Irish Film & Television Awards, the Satyajit Ray Award for Best First Film at the BFI London Film Festival, the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Prize and Ecumenical Film Prize at the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg, and Best First Feature Audience Award at Galway Film Fleadh.
He has worked commercially as a fashion photographer doing magazine and advertising campaign work.

Life and work

Ogden was born in 1961 in Shropshire, UK. He grew up in London, was educated at Eton College and first went to Ireland in 1985. He is now based in Dublin.
While at Eton, he published a magazine called Lipstick in 1979. He spent two years making portraits of the young riders and dealers in Smithfield horse market in Dublin, for his first book Pony Kids.
Inspired by what he had witnessed making Pony Kids, Ogden's first feature length film was Pavee Lackeen: The Traveller Girl, a documentary-style semi-improvised drama about Irish Travellers. He cast several members of the Maughan family as close versions of themselves and "wrote a script that draws on the Maughans’ experiences of living in a trailer on the edge of Dublin and encountering the sharp end of Irish bureaucracy."
Two brothers, boxers Paddy and Liam Doran from a Traveller family in Celbridge, County Kildare, modelled for Ogden when they were between ages 10 and 16, for various fashion campaigns. Ogden used these photographs for his book Paddy and Liam.

Publications

Photography books by Ogden