This picture seemed to fall together when I started the 'Professionals' series, it's quite simple in the idea of those guys weighing in to sort us out in Hill St., the main shopping street in Newry.

An amusing and amazing story related to this, I thought, fairly mild picture is that once when I had an exhibition in Newry Arts Centre, (I used to exhibit the work there every now and then to sort of try it out) I provided a print of this picture to the main local newspaper for the ad (I worked for the same newspaper as a photographer as a teenager, doing sports stuff and sometimes social events at 50p a face) .

When it was reproduced, however it was obvious that someone had scratched out the faces and numberplate in the plate/film, presumably because they thought it was a real photo of real military personnel...

Here's the ad:

And a detail:


I found this, and still do, quite scary and exciting, and it reminded me of the seriousness of the whole thing and the very thin lines between paranoia, fantasy and reality.