About Issey Goold

I’m Issey, an Irish photographer and fine artist living and working in London. I am currently pursuing my MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art (RCA, Class of 2027).

In my work, across digital, film, and wet plate collodion, I am interested in photos that embrace and reveal the zany, the interesting, and the weird in the everyday. In my fine art practice, I am especially interested in how historic photographic methods, such as wet plate collodion and ambrotype, can lend themselves to framing the fringe today. Recent work includes a series of queer portraits on stained-glass ambrotype (here), a women and cinema series featuring director Mary Bronstein (example here), and an ongoing series of collaborative portraits with living contemporary artists (here).

Work in Ireland

My work has been exhibited at numerous prestigious galleries in Ireland including the Royal Hibernian Academy Ireland (RHA) and Studio 10, Dublin, as well as featured in group exhibitions alongside local Irish artists, including at ÍOVA Group, Abbey Artists Studios, and Hens Teeth. I’ve had work published in several national publications, including The Irish Times (here) The Irish Independent (here and here), Life Magazine (here), Utopia magazine (here), and Gay Community News (here and here), as well as poster work showcased by renowned Dublin theaters including The Abbey Theatre (here) and Smock Alley Theatre (here). My work has appeared in several print formats, including as part of a postcard series by SMUT Press, and in my own 2022 collection Find Your Artists (available for purchase here), which brought together photographs of different artists (musicians, DJs, painters, sculptors) working in Ireland before and after the Pandemic.

Work in the US

From 2022-2026, I lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York. In 2024, I exhibited work at Juneshine (Williamsburg, Brooklyn) as part of “Three by Grebner”. In 2025, I was part of the group show, Time and Time Again: Fiction, Family, and Photography (Mar 14, 2025—Apr 10, 2025) in Manhattan, New York, curated by Victoria Horrocks. This show was reviewed in COPY.

In 2025, I also had my first US magazine cover with a portrait of film director Mary Bronstein for Filmmaker Magazine. You can see the Fall 2025 cover featuring my photograph in the Filmmaker Issue Archive here.

Work in the UK

In June 2024, I was invited to give an artist talk and workshop to the University of Cambridge research network, Ambivalent Archives. I presented my ongoing tintype project, “Generating Stanley: A Demi-Fable of Queer Lineage”, details of which can be found here.

I am currently available for London-based opportunities, both fine art and commercial (studio portraits, headshots etc). Please get in touch via my Contact page for further information and rates.

I received an honours BFA in Fine Art Media from The National College of Art & Design, Ireland (NCAD) in 2018. During this BFA I also studied Film, Video and Photography for an exchange semester at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In 2022, I received a postgraduate diploma in Cultural Policy & Arts Management from University College Dublin (UCD). In 2027, I will receive my MA Photography from the Royal College of Art, London.