TD 1
Opposite: Parnell Street, from END, Eamonn Doyle,
courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery. Above: An image from i series, Eamonn Doyle, courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery. Above right: Eamonn Doyle, photographed by Malcolm McGettigan. Left: Parnell Street, 1992, Eamonn Doyle, courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery. Eamonn Doyle has good reason to remember April 1st, 2014, as life-changing in seismic polar ways. It was the day in which celebrated photographer Martin Parr took to the Hard Core Street Photography forum on Flickr and told its 57 thousand or so members to take a look at i, Doyle’s debut, self-published book. He hailed its “beautiful printing, and great images” adding that “on top of this, the simplicity and directness of the images is brilliant.” It was also the day Doyle learned his mother Katherine was diagnosed with cancer. Doyle was already a monumental independent figurehead on Dublin’s club scene. Anyone engaged in club culture in the ‘90s and ‘00s will know him through his seminal D1 label, club nights and its offspring, the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF). However, after being submerged in that scene for over 20 years, he rekindled his original passion in photography and found a second calling which others have amplified. “I’d studied a diploma in photography in Dun Laoighaire, a year behind Niall (his designer) and Rory (Panti). Then I tried to go back into Fine Art and do Photography but they absolutely wouldn’t accept it. I had great ideas of becoming a documentary photographer with romantic notions of war and conflict. And then it absolutely didn’t happen.” Besides some travelling in Latin America and the Caribbean, he was always drawn to the inner city, off Parnell Street, where his family had business roots and Doyle has been living for almost 26 years. “I felt I should really be back in Dublin. When I was in the West or even here out in Sandycove, I was still drawn to this part of town. There was something specific about this area where I felt comfortable.” Having admittedly tired of the music game: “it became less interesting with the onset of digital. Part of the thrill was to see what records a DJ has brought in their bag. Suddenly they showed up with a laptop,” Doyle put out i in 2014. His was a shadowing presence capturing, mostly, elderly people as they went about their lives in the inner city. Shot from above, and usually behind his subjects, i captured both strength and frailty, imbuing ordinary actions with greater purpose. Out of that limited edition of 750 copies, he posted two – one to Alec Soth and the other to Parr. “We did a launch here and sold 60 books or something. I was hoping one of them might like it and put it on a list so over time I could sell the books. I had never met him (Parr) but I’d seen he had become an important figure in the photobook world and I was specifically inter45