Steve Ryan Photography

Staying a week in the worlds busiest Leprosy hospital is humbling experience to say the least. Given that the Madheshi’s & Maoists are just villages away, the hospital was one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been.

There are certain things in life that when you are in the moment, you know you’ll never going to forget them. Having a conversation with a man while he’s getting his toe amputated without anesthetic, helping a nurse take over ten maggots from another mans foot and befriending a 16 year old boy, Ram, who works 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for €16 a month while be riddled with leprosy are just some of them.

Published in Vice – The Sundaes Issue

To read the full story: http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n8/htdocs/leper-mesiah-159.php?source=db

To learn more about Nepal Leprosy Trust and it’s work please visit:

http://www.nlt.ie

* Now, we used the word “leper” here because we wanted to reference an old Metallica song. But you should know that people with leprosy consider that word really offensive. It carries a stigma that they’ve been trying to beat for years, and it’s outdated and ignorant. So next time you meet someone with leprosy, you are under no circumstances to call them a leper.

Ireland’s national newspaper the Sunday Business Post published this project as a cover story in May 2008.

Here are some more images from this project:

Photos: Steve Ryan

Words: Conor Creighton

I’ve been slacking with this blog and so am only getting around to posting this one now. Last Christmas, can’t believe it’s already eight months ago…nearly nine… we went for a drink with the man himself. When I say a drink I mean several trips to the ATM. Here’s the layout used.

It was a really interesting day. What a fascinating man.

There are some mornings where you use the snooze button and others when you don’t even need an alarm. A day in the back of an ice cream van!!!! Fantastic!!!! All the ice-cream you can eat for free has no price…well actually it was it probably would have cost around €12.50

This was quite possibly the hardest feature that I’ve worked on. It involved spending over a week in one of the worlds only sex resorts. Not only is it the kind of subject that you really don’t want to immerse yourself in but it’s hard to make friends in this field and then say “hey can I take your photo for a magazine?” As a result the designer had to be creative with his layout in order to print my reportage photographs. It was a difficult task and unfortunately the way I have laid in out below doesn’t give the design full credit, but what he did was to burn out the faces so that you can read directly through the page to the text on the page behind it. What I really like about this feature is the synergy of good words, photos and design.

Having traded in the bus for my bicycle some years back, I have been free from the colds and flus that nest among the coughs and sneezes of a Dublin bus. This story documents a bright idea I had to venture around the city routes of Dublin for one whole day starting with the early morning commutes to work moving onto the not so early morning commutes to college and the late morning senior citizen commute to mass and so on and so on. We started out at 5am and finished our adventure after midnight. I can’t recall how many buses we were on or how long we waited at bus stops, but I do know that it was over a week that I spent in bed afterwards nursing the damn flu!