Bruce Gilden was born in 1946 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. After taking photography classes at the School of Visual Arts, he embarked on his first major project: recording tourists and pleasure-seekers visiting Coney Island. Gilden is probably best known for his work on the streets of New York, focusing on the city's characters and outsiders, but he has also spent many years on projects devoted on projects in Haiti, Japan, and Ireland. A member of Magnum Photos since 1998, Gilden has taken the genre of street photography and pushed it in new directions, documenting the essence of the people he sees and the social landscape through which they move.

After the Off is a unique collaboration between two great artists. Set in rural Ireland, against the background of the on-course gambling operating at the many local race meetings held throughout the country, it combines the intensity of Bruce Gilden's powerful black and white portraits with the vividly atmospheric story-telling of Dermot Healy, one of Ireland's leading contemporary writers. A poet, playwright, short-story writer and novelist Dermot Healy has received numerous awards.