Eamonn Doyle, i

Eamonn Doyle

Aperture’s Lit issue introduced me to the work of Eamonn Doyle, a photographer based in Dublin. His series i is inspired by Samuel Beckett. As he told LensCulture:

I was re-discovering the work of Samuel Beckett, specifically the “trilogy” comprising the novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable. I began to be drawn towards a number of solitary “Beckettian” figures I saw on the streets of Dublin, people I had seen passing me every day who seemed to be treading the same ground, day in, day out … I wondered how I might approach the photographing of these people, who were after all (and who remain) near-total strangers to me … Is it possible to take photographs of these people in such a way that will honor their essential, even existential, distance from me? … This tension between, on the one hand, the attempt, and subsequent failure, to gain knowledge and, on the other, what happens in the act of attempting-then-failing is something that interests me. It’s a contradiction with which many of Beckett’s characters seem to be familiar. It’s also a point at which a representation, in reaching a limit point, acknowledges its status as an act.

See more of his work on his website, in Aperture, and at LensCulture.

Eamonn Doyle