ONE (SIGNED)
Eamonn Doyle
ONE (SIGNED)
Photographs: Eamonn Doyle
Publisher: D1
104 pages
Pictures: 51
Year: 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9928487-1-2
Comments: Hardcover (blue) with obi, 36,5 28,2 cm, b&w photographs. Limited edition of 999 (333 for each cover). In very good condition. Signed by Eamonn Doyle.
Eamonn Doyle’s second photo-book, ‘ON, follows last year’s ‘i’, a collection of street portraits from Dublin city centre. In ‘ON’, black and white figures stalk across Dublin streetscapes, by turns lost, menacing, wary, browbeaten or entranced – but always at odds in some way with their environment.
As in ‘i’, the photographs were mostly taken on Dublin’s Parnell Street and O’Connell Street. But here the historic role of those two streets as zones of resistance, protest and insurrection is far more present. The very title of the book itself evokes a resistance – that doggedly existential kind identified by Samuel Beckett’s narrator in ‘The Unnameable’: ‘You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’
The figures are dynamic – muscles taut, heads in mid-turn, bodies in motion. Some flee the photographic gaze itself. Others stare challengingly down the barrel of the lens. Most appear caught up in projects so intensely private that they have an air of total inaccessibility. Rarely does the photographic act intrude so little on the lives of its subjects. Paradoxically, the energy is sought at precisely those moments when the unruly subjects look most likely to tear the images asunder.
The central drama of the book could thus be said to be its subjects’ struggle with representation – not necessarily against it, but writhing, wriggling, jockeying with it. The resulting images invariably draw attention to the photographic act. One never forgets that these images have been selected, framed, constructed. One is never tempted to identify the image with the subject of the image or to respond ‘I know exactly how that person feels.’ The interiority of the subjects is preserved; their dignity remains intact.
‘ON’ opens out to history more directly than its predecessor. Whereas ‘I’ was preoccupied with figures consumed by introspection, the dramas in ‘ON’ are far more environmental. Dublin’s hermetic seal has cracked open and the rest of the world has somehow spilled in. These subjects are photographed mostly from the front and from a lower angle. It’s a presentation that opens out their world, contextualising them by placing them against an architectural backdrop. Where the mysterious, often faceless figures of ‘i’ were often flattened against their worlds, the subjects of ‘ON’ stand out and strike out against their environments, often looming against skies in a way that speaks of possibility, even as they nurse wounds or eye each other suspiciously.
- John McMahon
more books by Eamonn Doyle
more books tagged »signed « | >> see all
-
Via Pia (SIGNED AND NUMBERED, edt of 100)
by Tiane Doan na Champassak
sold -
PALERMO DIARY (SIGNED)
by Werner Mansholt
sold -
Photographs 1988-91 (SIGNED)
by Koji Onaka
Euro 250 -
Sketch Album (Signed and dedicated copy)
by Shoji Ueda
sold -
TOKYO ON THE BRINK OF SANITY (SIGNED)
by Yoshio Mizoguchi
sold -
WHITE NOISE (SIGNED)
by António Júlio Duarte
Euro 45
more books tagged »city« | >> see all
-
City Stills
by Ray K. Metzker
sold -
Berenice Abbott
by Berenice Abbott
Euro 120 -
NOTES BOURGEDINES (SIGNED, Artist's edition)
by Sandrine Marc
Euro 150 -
Home Among Black Hills
by Jens Olof Lasthein
sold -
LIPS THAT WOULD KISS
by Benoit Grimbert
Euro 750 -
Bangkok Sketches
by Mauro D'Agati
Euro 35
more books tagged »dublin« | >> see all
more books tagged »street photography « | >> see all
-
Hitoe (SIGNED)
by Michio Yamauchi
Euro 75 -
TOKYO BITES
by Stefan Banz
Euro 15 -
Radiation Inspiration (EDT OF 130)
by Yoshi Yubai
sold -
A FAMILIAR PLACE (SIGNED)
by Simon Johansson
Euro 40 -
Agenda 2001
by Osamu Wataya
Euro 45 -
Prospects Vol.3 (SIGNED)
by Kazuyuki Kawaguchi
sold
Books from the Virtual Bookshelf josefchladek.com