Before fitting a photographer,Sean Hillen was a tinkerer. As a young teenager, one of his favourite pastimes was to take apart his grandfather's frail cameras and then piece them back together again. It wasn't long before he discovered that with a bit of tweaking he could fix a brand new 120 roll of film into an outmoded 620 camera. “I did that, and I got them developed,and I was immediately addicted to photography".
Hillen grew up through the Troubles in Newry, Northern Ireland, and close to the border with the Republic of Ireland. It was utter chaos,” he says. “I knew people who got killed, and I knew people who killed other people”. Hillen and his four siblings would lie awake in bed at night listening to gun battles, or which were so frequent that they were able to distinguish between the sounds of different weapons.
Source: bjp-online.com