Eamonn Doyle, Irish, b. 1969
Title: Untitled 28, from the series i
Date: 2013
Medium: Archival pigment print
Dimensions:
80 x 53.5 cm
Credit Line: Purchased, 2019
Object Number: NGI.2019.167
DescriptionBorn in Dublin in 1969, Eamonn Doyle graduated with a Diploma in Photography from IADT in 1991. He spent much of the next twenty years working in the independent music business. In recent years, Doyle has returned to his practice of photography. Most of his work is produced in and around Dublin city centre. Inspired by the solitary characters of Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre, i is a series of cropped portraits of individuals as they go about their daily lives. Most of the subjects are elderly, which imbues the images with a strong sense of the transience of our existence. In i, Doyle presents a sequence of images depicting unknowable figures enveloped entirely in their own interior landscape of street, poised in silent choreography. Doyle has said of his work; “I usually tried to avoid showing the faces. Not showing faces seemed to be a way to evoke the very unknowability of these people, and perhaps, by implication, of all those with whom we have such fleeting, urban encounters”.
End. gives equal significance to the city and its population, but here their combined forces collectively and continuously morph each other in order to survive. Individual journeys of everyday life are compacted repetitively into the same streets. Dubliners wear away at the constructed autonomy of their city, while the streets themselves become a kind of sculptural mental State. End. unfolds like a series of maps — loops of time and place — revealing a city whose concrete is as plastic as the movement of its inhabitants.
End. gives equal significance to the city and its population, but here their combined forces collectively and continuously morph each other in order to survive. Individual journeys of everyday life are compacted repetitively into the same streets. Dubliners wear away at the constructed autonomy of their city, while the streets themselves become a kind of sculptural mental State. End. unfolds like a series of maps — loops of time and place — revealing a city whose concrete is as plastic as the movement of its inhabitants.
ProvenancePurchased, Michael Hoppen Gallery, 2019