Untitled, from the i series
© Eamonn Doyle/Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery

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Eamonn Doyle’s Dublin Streets

Sometimes the sets and characters of a neighborhood become just a background track for daily life. The peripherals fade from view. Familiar details lose their luster. People pass unseen.

The act of creating through a camera lens can bring a neighborhood back into focus.

That’s exactly what happened when Irish photographer Eamonn Doyle took camera in hand after a 20-year hiatus.

He rediscovered his home turf—capturing the urban landscape of North Dublin within a half-mile radius of his house, often finding his subjects within just 10 meters of his front door.

He stripped scenes to their essence and brought himself—and those who spend time with his photographs—inside the pulse of Parnell and O’Connell streets.

A reverence for the Parnell Street elders
© Meredith Mullins/Exhibit Photographs © Eamonn Doyle

The result was a trilogy of books (i, ON, and End.) and an exhibit at this year’s Rencontres d’Arles that takes hold of the viewer in an unshakeable way.

No Manifestos

Eamonn Doyle at the Rencontres d’Arles
© Meredith Mullins

Presenting one of the best shows of the festival, Doyle lands with force on the stage of world photography.

He makes no claims about his images. He doesn’t like labels. The photographs could be called landscapes of the city, fleeting portraits, or a unique form of street photography as seen through only his eyes.

He has no manifesto or intellectual philosophy. He just makes pictures—pictures of passing strangers on their individual journeys.

Welcome to the neighborhood.

The i Series: The Respected Elders

The i series features the local elders—those characters who have worn a familiar path in the neighborhood streets.

Doyle is drawn to solitary figures. He takes this isolation further by working to eliminate what he calls the “visual noise of the streets.” He shoots on Monday mornings, after the street cleaners have removed trash and grime and captures his subjects in the simplest graphics of a setting.

“I shot from above, mostly, and tried to flatten the figures into the pavements and roads,” Eamonn said of the i series. As a result, the subjects often seem weighed down, as if being looked at by the burden of life itself.

Untitled, from the i series
© Eamonn Doyle/Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery

Their faces are usually turned away, affirming their anonymity—their status as strangers. However, what is not shown is important.

As Eamonn explains, “I want the viewer to look elsewhere, to find cues other than the obvious ones, to look harder and, if need be, to infer the missing faces.”

The viewer must act . . . must notice these usually unnoticed souls—the textures, colors, and style of their clothes; their few cherished possessions; their pace, posture, and gestures—their journey.

Untitled, from the ON series
© Eamonn Doyle/Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery

The ON Series: The Changing Cityscape

The second segment of the trilogy shows a neighborhood changing dramatically in mood and tense. We, as viewers, enter a raw and vibrant present.

Where the elders were flattened into the scene, the ON subjects leap from the photographs in strong black-and-white, low-angled power.

Here, we see the strangers’ faces, movement, energy, and the context of their lives.

Untitled, from the ON series
© Eamonn Doyle/Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery

The neighborhood is dynamic, exploding in a multicultural mix of activity. Immigrants from West Africa, China, and Eastern Europe clash with the sharp edges and angles of the city.

And we begin to understand the text that fueled Doyle’s theme for this series.

You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
—Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

The End. Series: The Loop of Life

In the third segment of the trilogy, we see the neighborhood in bits and pieces—a mosaic of lines, forms, textures, and inhabitants—that we somehow know are destined to have impact on each other.

Untitled, from the End. series
© Eamonn Doyle/Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery

This series is not just a collaboration with fragments of life. It is an artistic collaboration, with Doyle providing the photographic vision, Niall Sweeney providing design and illustration, and David Donohoe replacing the usual city sounds with a haunting, looping electronic track.

Strangers in a strange Dublinland
© Meredith Mullins/Exhibit Photographs © Eamonn Doyle

Immersed in the Neighborhood at Rencontres d’Arles

End., as well as i and ON, came together this year in the dramatic installation at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in southern France—a revelation for world photography.

For me, the “Oh, I See” moment came as soon as I entered the darkened Espace Van Gogh.

Here, Doyle, Sweeney, and Donohoe have recreated Doyle’s North Dublin neighborhood pulsing with life—an integration of past, present, and future that made the theme of passing time clear on so many different levels.

Stepping into Dublin streets at the Rencontres d’Arles
© Meredith Mullins/Exhibit Photographs © Eamonn Doyle

The design of the installation transported me to the streets, but I was not as hurried as the photographic subjects.  I paused and let the city find its rhythm, much as Doyle must have—picking out the most interesting characters and studying them as they passed by unaware that anyone is watching.

Windows to the streets of Dublin
© Meredith Mullins/Exhibit Photographs © Eamonn Doyle

The physicality and scale of the panels lent themselves to the energy of a city, and the well-placed “windows” in the grids allowed a view beyond that first glimpse of life.

When a connection was made, the eyes of the strangers on the walls were penetrating, following me whichever way I walked.

The whole experience was mesmerizing.

The eyes of this Dublin stranger follow you long after you leave.
© Meredith Mullins/Exhibit Photograph © Eamonn Doyle

Most of all, I was inspired to reconnect with my own neighborhood—to slow down and take a closer look at the fleeting human drama that is always present—and to say, with the rest of the world, “I’ll go on.”  

Visit Eamonn Doyle’s Exhibit in the Espace Van Gogh at the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France, until September 25. Find more of Doyle’s work on his website and at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London.

Find more information on the Rencontres d’Arles here. 

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