SHAY HEALY: THE ART OF THE INSTAMATIC

Having watched Shay Healy hold tightly onto his little camera as he, and the Music City USA crew, travelled thousands of miles across the United States this summer, believe me, I know he is driven by a sometimes infuriating "fundamental impulse" to capture beauty. Plus ugliness, pain, poverty, poetry in static form or in motion and humour - in one word: America, in all its twisted glory.

I still painfully recall one particular dawn ride to Branson, Missouri when he wouldn't stop bitching because the van driver hadn't stopped to let him photograph a sign which read, "Healy's Rest Home - for decrepit TV presenters" or some such American monstrosity. We all wanted to sleep, but even at 7am Healy was buzzing and open and receptive and eager not to let one moment pass by, unnoticed or unrecorded. And when we stopped at a trucker's café for breakfast he was finished eating and out there on the roadside photographing billboard signs before we'd even ordered our coffee.

Of course, with his similar excursions into the world of performing, songwriting and novel writing, many might argue that Shay Healy is simply the most obvious dilettante Ireland has produced this century. I think not. To me, he's a shadowed soul, a man more complex than his public image would suggest, and, consequently, a maze of creative energy reaching for that one mode of expression that will satisfy all his needs. He'll probably never find it. Any maybe he should stop searching and accept that, as a multimedia-ted product of the country which gave the world Zooropa, he has the freedom, and the right, to express himself in any damn way he chooses.

And irrespective of what the self-appointed mandarins of "high art" may say, these images, in his 'Art of the Instamatic' exhibition are, in equal measures, America; how Shay Healy perceives America and what each moment he has chosen tells us about the human condition of which we all are a part. In the end, this, to me, is the true art of the very instamatic Shay Healy.

Shay Healy's exhibition of photographs opened at the Restaurant Tosca, in Dublin, on October 19th.

• Joe Jackson