Eamonn Doyle’s ‘Beckettian’ street photographs and portraits of the inhabitants of his native Dublin are a bold new presentation of familiar genres. His timeless characters provide a meditation on the act of photography itself, of fleeting encounters captured, a transient moment immortalized.
Doyle’s second series ‘ON’ follows a widely acclaimed first series titled ‘i’; and presents lost, menacing figures stalking across Dublin streetscapes in black and white. The subjects are dynamic – muscles taut, heads in mid-turn, bodies in motion and always at odds with their environment. Neither a portrait of a city nor a treatise about its citizens, ‘ON’ is at once more modest and more passionately involved in its subjects than its predecessor.
“Returning to photography in recent years, I set out to work with what I knew. 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 Beckett.”
- Eamonn Doyle
ARMORY 2016, PIER 92, BOOTH 124
