Horgan, John Joseph (1905–64), press photographer, was born 20 May 1905 at 13 Moore Street, Dublin, 'in the shadow of Nelson's pillar', the second of two sons of John Horgan, who owned the Boyneview dairy shop (located in the family's house), and his wife Rosanna (née O'Rourke; she was born in Ohio but her family came from Trim, Co. Meath). Horgan's father was born in Cork city and may have been related to J. J. Horgan (qv) but no definite connection has been established. Horgan attended the Central Model School in Marlborough Street. The family premises were occupied by the rebels during the 1916 Easter rising, and on 'Bloody Sunday' (21 November 1920) the dairy, as the only business premises in the street open on a Sunday, became a staging post for walking wounded en route from Croke Park to Jervis Street hospital.
The family's sympathies were originally Redmondite but became separatist after the executions of the 1916 leaders. In 1917 a cousin who was active in the Irish Volunteers bought the young Horgan his first camera (using the purchase as a decoy to acquire military binoculars for himself) and got the boy to photograph various military and police targets under the pretext of teaching him this new skill. In 1919 Horgan's photographic enthusiasm attracted the attention of two English photographers, the Maunders brothers, who had just established themselves at 35 Henry Street as the Dublin representatives of the Hulton newspapers. The Maunderses engaged Horgan as their apprentice-assistant (though his father insisted that he should continue his academic education by attending evening classes at Marino College).
On 14 October 1920 Horgan was allowed to go out with the Maunderses' expensive Palmos camera while the brothers went to the cinema. While wandering idly in the city centre he encountered the British raiding party that killed Seán Treacy (qv) in Talbot Street, and took an exclusive photograph of Treacy's body lying on the pavement. As a 16-year-old boy in short trousers he was regarded as harmless by the army searchers, and escaped with the picture, which was widely reproduced. Horgan regarded this as the true starting point of his photographic career.
Horgan's city-centre residence gave him a grandstand view of raids by crown forces (and later of fighting during the civil war). Some pictures taken by Horgan and reproduced in British newspapers attracted official censure (including one of detainees at Ballykinlar camp being forced to drill at bayonet point, and another of Bloody Sunday casualties exhibiting their injuries). At the same time, the naïve willingness of the Maunders brothers to accept crown forces' versions of events, and the tendentious captions supplied to some of their pictures by the Dublin Castle censors, brought warnings from the IRA. (One of Horgan's tasks was to take copies of photographs from the Hulton's office to Dublin Castle, where these were marked up by the censors; Horgan claimed that on the way back he 'accidentally' threw some of the marked prints into the Liffey, flattering himself with the thought that he was doing work of national importance.) After the Maunderses photographed a 'reconstructed' scene of the deaths of Dick McKee (qv) and Peadar Clancy (qv) (shot in Dublin Castle on Bloody Sunday 'while attempting to escape') they were ordered by the IRA to leave the country within forty-eighty hours.
Horgan went to work in a commercial photographic studio, resisting his parents' urgings that he should return to studying for a civil service job. On 17 March 1921 the Horgan family's Moore Street dwelling was raided by crown forces, leading to the confiscation of Horgan's camera and other material (including his souvenir print of the Talbot Street photograph) though the officer in charge let him off with a warning. Horgan continued to freelance as a press photographer, covering such scenes as the IRA attack on the Dublin Custom House (25 May 1921) and the dáil debates on the ratification of the Anglo–Irish treaty. These activities brought him into contact with Matt Rice, chief photographer for Independent Newspapers, the most successful Irish newspaper group. During the fighting in Dublin at the outbreak of the civil war, Rice and Horgan made a picture-sharing agreement; although Rice was subsequently rendered hors de combat when anti-treatyites occupied the Irish Independent's photographic department at Carlisle Buildings (on the site later occupied by O'Connell Bridge House at the end of D'Olier Street), Horgan faithfully supplied him with pictures of anti-treatyites surrendering at the Hammam Hotel on O'Connell Street.
Through Rice's influence, Horgan was engaged as assistant photographer by Independent Newspapers on 31 July 1922 and spent the rest of his career with the group. Independent Newspapers prided themselves on their use of photography; in addition to ordinary news photographs, Horgan produced many special photographic features for the group, and many examples of his work can be found in the pages of Independent Newspapers for the period and in the photographic collection which the group subsequently donated to the National Photographic Archive (merged with the National Library of Ireland).
In 1925 Horgan acquired his first motorcycle, and was commissioned to tour the border counties taking photographs illustrating the nationalist sentiment of the population (to be used to support the nationalist case at the boundary commission). He also had his first experience of aeroplane flight (with a 'barnstorming' pilot on Skerries beach) and became an enthusiast for the aeroplane (he was a founding member of the Leinster Aero Club) and its possibilities both as a rapid transport method for 'scoops' and a platform for aerial photography. In 1929 his photographs taken in Cork for the Independent of centenary celebrations of catholic emancipation were flown to Dublin in record time, and in 1933 his flight (with a pilot) to Liverpool to cover the Aintree Grand National, returning the same evening and publishing his pictures in the next morning's Independent, became a highly publicised stunt for the paper.
In 1930 Horgan took the first aerial photograph for an Irish paper (a view of Finglas, then a single-street village); during the 1932 Dublin eucharistic congress he took the principal aerial picture of the major devotional gathering in the Phoenix Park on 26 June, and in the same year he qualified as a pilot. (He ultimately logged 2,000 hours' flight time, though much of this may have been as a co-pilot.)
In 1932 Horgan was a passenger on the first experimental airline flight from Ireland (by the Dutch airline KLM from Dublin to London), and he subsequently travelled on the inaugural Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Bristol (27 May 1936). His recollections emphasise his 'thirst for travel' and insistence on running risks to get pictures (e.g., 'crawling out upon a four-inch girder 300 feet above the Thames to photograph a team of Tipperary workers on the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain South Bank site' in 1951 (Sunday Independent, 1 December 1957)). He found confinement to Ireland during the 1939–45 emergency (in which he covered such stories as the Belfast blitz and the North Strand bombing) intensely frustrating.
The principal sources for Horgan's career are two autobiographical serials which he wrote for Independent Newspapers, the first in 1937 and the other in 1957 (cited below). The latter, 'Strictly in camera', is more specifically autobiographical; the earlier contains extensive passages on Horgan's career, dominated by air technology and the use of photography in mass media yet also displaying strongly traditional catholic and nationalist beliefs, and serves as a reminder that mid-century Ireland did not necessarily see itself as anti-modern (as it is often perceived in retrospect) but as pursuing its own distinctive relationship with the fascinations of modernity. As a photographer, Horgan also helped to shape later perceptions of his era to a degree which has yet to be fully explored.
By 1951 Horgan developed angina pectoris, and his worsening heart condition led to his retirement from Independent Newspapers in 1955. He died on 17 March 1964 at his residence, 14 Deanstown Avenue, Finglas, Dublin. With his wife Beatrice (m. 1927), he had a son, Sean, who also worked as a photographer for Independent Newspapers, and two daughters.
Horgan's encounter with the final shoot-out of Seán Treacy produced a bizarre coda. The instalment of 'Strictly in camera' published on 29 September 1957, in which Horgan described his taking of the Talbot Street photograph, was illustrated by a still from the film Irish destiny (1926), depicting a man in civilian clothing shooting a handgun, described as a typical scene from the gun battles raging in Dublin at the time. Although a subsequent letter from Horgan (Sunday Independent, 13 October 1957) explaining that his photograph had not been reproduced because he no longer had a copy, shows that he did not present the Irish destiny still as his work, it appears that after his death his son, mistakenly believing that the still reproduced with the column was the photograph referred to in the text, supplied it for use in a 1972 Anvil Press reprint of My fight for Irish freedom by Dan Breen (qv). The still was subsequently reproduced in several books as a genuine photograph of the Talbot Street shoot-out, and its true origins were only revealed in 2010. The real photograph is probably that published in the Weekly Irish Times of 23 October 1920 and attributed to 'Hogan' (showing the bodies of a British solider and a civilian (presumably Treacy) lying on a footpath), although the matter is confused by the fact that another photograph, reputedly showing a body being carried away after the Talbot Street shoot-out, is displayed online at the Hulton Archive and attributed to Sean Sexton (though dated 1 January 1920), and that the scene was also filmed by a Pathé News cameraman, Gordon Lewis.