John Gunn Camera Shop

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Phone: 01 478 1226

Address:

John Gunn Camera Shop
16 Wexford Street
Dublin D02 FY99

County: Dublin

Categories: Cameras and Accessories

Keywords: Wholesale, camera, accessories, equipment, photographic, Ireland

Thank you for visiting our website. John Gunn Camera Shop is a family owned and operated business now in its second generation.
Our store is nexus of old meets new, traditional and modern. We sell cutting edge cameras and photographic equipment, as we have been doing for nearly 50 years.
We love our physical store, meeting people, sharing information, exchanging knowledge and humour and we hope to give you a flavour of this here on our website. We look forward to sharing our knowledge with you.

Photography has long been a passion within the Gunn family. John’s mother established a small darkroom business from her home towards the end of the Second World War and his brother was a professional photographer who introduced him to the business initially, and that intimacy with this art has been passed to subsequent generations. John is pictured at the Shaushin 10 photographic show that he and Louise organised in Dublin in 1969.

John and Louise have worked together for over 50 years. Prior to establishing John Gunn Camera Shop, they were the management team behind the photographic department at Roches Chemist on Grafton Street. In 1971 team Gunn first opened their doors for business in a Premises on Dublin’s Pleasant Street, just a small walk from the current shop. The car is clearly the subject of this photo, but sadly did not belong to the new shop owner.

John has always had a love of Märklin model trains and it came as no surprise that they began to feature in the shop’s product list (you can see them creeping in behind him in the photo below).

At one point in the history of the shop, the trains featured so strongly in the product line that the shop name was changed to reflect this “John Gunn Camera Shop and Märklin Model Railways”.

The change in name coincided with the move to the current premises at 16 Wexford Street. The new shop opened its doors on the 8th of December 1980, sadly the same day as John Lennon, one of John’s musical heroes, was shot dead in New York.
Over the years, they experimented with other product lines, home-brew being one, and we even sold Lolo Balls at one stage! (you can see the home brew lines up nicely beside the darkroom chemicals in the photo of John and Louise below, all evidence of lolo balls has been cocooned!)
Around this time, Louise developed a strong interest in black and white film processing, so much so, that while previously John’s domain, she became the darkroom expert in the shop and began processing and printing black and white film by hand in the onsite darkroom. The seeds of the business as it is today were sewn.

In the late 1990’s they were joined in the business by two of their four daughters: Fiona and Cathy. Both girls, graduates of Trinity, are passionate about photography. With the second generation through the door, John and Louise extended the business to include a full colour laboratory operating on premise.
We hope you will find this site helpful and if you don’t see what you are looking for, please get in touch via email, phone or even better, pop in and see us - we look forward to meeting you.