Born in Dublin in 1969, 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.
"As a long-term resident of Parnell Street in Dublin's north inner city, there was a wealth of photographic subjects on my doorstep. It's an old working class area, now quite multicultural. At times it's edgy and raw and vibrant, while at others, it seems half-sunk in a weary pathos. This set of photographs came about over a long reflective period in which I was re-reading [Samuel] Beckett.
"It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know. You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on."
- The last line of The Unnameable from Beckett's trilogy
While photographing, I began to strip away as much of the context and background from the subjects as I could. The subjects are all shot at close range, but respectfully, perhaps even reverently. The pictures show only fragments of possible narratives, but for me, every life has weight and drama, even if its meaning is ultimately elusive."
- Eamonn Doyle
