On: Eamonn Doyle

Description

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.’