Lottie Davies
A seagull is suspended, sunlit and spread-winged against a lowering sky. Men unknown to each other march together as if advancing on an unseen enemy. A woman with polished shoes searches through a large, pale handbag. Young girls in matching dresses look to be fleeing impending disaster. Eamonn Doyle shows us fragments of moments in a world of uncertainty and human frailty, with a unique and potentially devastating voice. A relative newcomer to the world of photobooks and photography galleries, he has become a powerful force in the art photography world since 2012.
DOYLE wasn’t always a photographer. Despite having studied photography and painting at IADT in Dublin, for 20 years he barely touched a camera, having found himself unexpectedly thrown into a career in the music business. He travelled around the world DJ-ing, mostly in Europe and Asia, and ended up founding and running the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival as well as a record label and a recording studio. He was all set to be in music for the rest of his life, but then the recession came.
“In late 2008, the crash hit in Ireland. We got hit first and worst. So I packed it in and bought a camera. I bought a Leica M7, although I’d never had a rangefinder before. And I pretty much just picked up from where I left off after college, just walking around the streets.”
Doyle has lived in the same street in Dublin since 1992, in a building bought by his father “for about ten pounds”, in a derelict and desperate area.
“I was one of two people living in the street when I moved in,” he says. “It was basically decimated by heroin and drugs. It still kind of is, but it’s now one of the most densely populated parts of the city; there was a huge wave of immigration in the 1990s and 2000s. When I started taking photographs again, the whole city had changed. It felt like the whole world had come to Dublin.”
In those 20 years, photography had also changed dramatically. Doyle’s influencers at college were ‘the Magnum greats’; classic black and white social documentary work. But while he was away, the great surge towards conceptual photography and increased respect for colour work had taken hold. He describes having trouble ‘finding his feet’ at the beginning. “I was shooting black and white film with the M7, tentatively – enjoying the prints and the darkroom, but not getting anywhere in particular. And then I bought the M9, the digital version of the same camera. I decided to make some really simple changes. I’d never shot vertically, ever. And I’d never shot in colour. So I figured, I’ll just do that and see what happens.”
What happened was his first photobook, i, which came out in 2012. It was a collec
