Eamonn Doyle Irish, b. 1969

Born and raised in Dublin, Eamonn Doyle graduated with a Diploma in Photography from IADT in 1991. He spent much of the next twenty years producing music and working in the independent music business, founding the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF) alongside the record labels D1 Recordings and Dead Elvis.

 

Doyle returned to photography in 2008 and his debut photobook i was published in March 2014. Most of his work is produced in and around the Dublin city centre where he has lived for the past 20 years, proving that some of the best photographs can be taken on your very own doorstep. Doyle's i series is a study of beautifully cropped portraits of individuals as they go about their daily lives. Most of them are elderly which imbues the images with a strong sense of the transience of our existence; their many experiences - their joys and sadnesses - they wear on their faces. Implicitly this is, then, also a meditation on photography itself: its ability to capture at once a fleeting moment and a complete story. Doyle manages to endow the images with an eerie purity, for they are void of the litter and urban furniture that is usually so common in street photography.

 

Martin Parr has described i as 'the best street photo book in a decade'. Indeed, the series is reminiscent of some of the greats, such as Walker Evans' Subway Portrait from the late 1930s, Harry Callahan's Chicago series of the 1950s, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia's Streetwork of the 1990s. The pictures possess all the mystery, candour and what Walker Evans described as "naked repose" of timeless street photography.

 

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