Man in the mask Paddy Coyle sadly dies
Paddy Coyle was aged 13 when he was photographed in the city’s Bogside in 1969.
Photographer Clive Limpkin’s image made the front cover of newspapers and magazines around the world.
Mr Coyle’s cousin, Tom Kelly, said he had passed away on Sunday.
In a statement on social media, Mr Kelly said: “Paddy never ever exploited his iconic image, he refused many offers from TV documentary makers and newspapers to tell his story behind the image as he didn’t like talking about it.
Mr Kelly, one of the Bogside Artists, would later use the image in one of Derry’s most recognisable murals.
He said Mr Coyle will be “missed by all who knew and loved him, but his image as a young boy….in 1969 will live on forever.”
The photo was taken during what became known as the Battle of the Bogside, three days of rioting in 1969 viewed by many as the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Mr Limpkin, who passed away in May, described his 1969 photograph as “the nearest thing I ever had to an iconic picture”.
Speaking last year, fifty years after the photograph was taken, Mr Limpkin said he had only taken one shot of the teenager.
“Suddenly there was this 13-year-old boy in the picture, I think I got one snap of him and you don’t generally know if you’ve got a good picture, but I knew then I wasn’t going to beat that and I never got a better picture”.
Pulitzer prize winning photographer Cathal McNaughton said the photo of Paddy Coyle “is more than just a snapshot in time, it evokes emotions in people”.
Lensman Clive Limpkin died in May this year
“It brings you to that time and place, and why it lives in the collective memory of the masses,” he said.
He added: “You’ve got the petrol bomb, you’ve actually got a badge of the island of Ireland on it, it places the picture exactly, and this oversized gas mask that adds an almost sinister element to the picture, almost a scary addition, and the clothes, the leather jacket that places it in its time as well.”
Maeve McLaughlin of the Museum of Free Derry said Paddy Coyle and Clive Limpkin had an opportunity to meet last year when the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Bogside was being marked in Derry.
She said Mr Coyle had never “wanted to be in the limelight but was quite proud of it (the image) in his own way”.
Ms McLaughlin said the image of Mr Coyle was very much symbolic of the history it reflects, and of the “ordinary people, in this case a child, in extremely extraordinary times”.
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