Irish Arts Review

Impressions of a CityAuthor(s): Alan MurdochSource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 22, No. 3 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 84-89Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25503254 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW AUTUMN 2005

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PHOTOGRAPHY

IMPRESSIONS OF A CITY

Impressions

of a

Cit

y

As the renowned

photographer Bill

Doyle reaches his

eightieth birthday,

ALAN MURDOCH

talks to him about

half a century of

singular images

w

hat you find on the walls of someone's house gives an

unparalleled insight into their character', argues Bill

Doyle. In his case the fruits of a lifetime's curiosity

adorn his 1840s house in Dublin's Liberties: paintings and sketches from across Europe jostle for space with prints and portraits of musicians, and

several of his own landmark black-and-white images. Countless magazines, novels, and the

entire canon of European and US photography pack his shelves alongside a large collection

of jazz books and records, his other great passion after the camera. Outside, an abundant

front garden projects a living colour spectrum straight from an ad for Kodachrome film.

On a baking summer's morning shortly before his eightieth birthday, Doyle's limitless

interests send the conversation darting off at tangents from gardening to Mediterranean

islands, new Dublin slang, Jewish black humour, football managers, the joys of Grogan's pub,

and why photographers get such beautiful women: 'It's the aesthetic life that appeals to them,'

he claims, citing David Bailey's seduction of Catherine Deneuve

while modestly glossing over his own notorious charm.

For the next three hours he produces armfuls of 16 x 12

inch prints of his favourite work, some published, some never

seen publicly. He homes in on one, the portrait of a Stephen's

Green cleaning lady, to reveal how there may only be a single

moment when a picture becomes possible: 'She worked in the

next building, I think Annie Murphy was her name. I tried

many times but she would never really let me take her picture.

I'd say: "That's OK". Then on this day I had the camera out

and she said "Oh Bill, You're an awful man!" and I thought:

'Today is the day and I got it'

'It's only later you appreciate the detail and why it worked -

newspaper on the floor, the verticals (the pillars) and the narrow

light from the window against the dark inside', he laughs: 'I had

a Caravaggio moment there.' It became the cover of his 2001 col

lection Images of Dublin - A Time Remembered, underlining his

fascination with plain Dubliners as stars in his camera's eye.

Doyle distinguishes between his 'grab shots' - catching an

interesting face off-guard on the street - and more considered

images, exquisite vignettes drawing on all the photographic

techniques. He once said: 'Light... is 50 per cent of what you

1 St Stephen's

Green, 1974

2 Bewley's Cafe, Grafton Street 1967

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85

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see. If there are no shadows in the scene, then I will not bother

with it. I will not waste the film. The secret of successful black

and white photography is texture and light' An image in constant

demand is his 1976 Donegal scene of a Dunfanaghy farmer

flanked by two sheepdogs walking purposefully away from the

camera up a sunlit sandy track. The symmetry, the monochrome

textures of the grasses and the upward direction of the path as it

becomes a triangle hold the eye in an almost hypnotic way.

Tony O'Shea, another noted photographer of Dublin street-life,

praises his quietly observed style: 'Most of the things that interest

him would not have been the bread-and-butter of news photogra

phy. He has not followed politicians or public life as a subject He

has never worked (on staff) for a publication, so what he pho

tographed were his own interests. It has been a labour of love.'

'Using a small (Rolleiflex) camera in the street, he has an

almost tourist-like approach. Bill was never a man for gadgets,'

says Matt Kavanagh of the Irish Times. 'One great advantage of the

way he operates is that the subject is never put on notice that

they're going to be photographed.' 'Doyle's complex intellect and

his singular visual sense are one and the same', Kavanagh feels.

'He's well-travelled, and he and his partner Betty are active hill

walkers. He's widely read and he's also a great listener. That

Most of the things that interest him would not have

been the bread-and-butter of news photography comes across in his photography, he will watch and wait. He's also

entirely without fear.'

Normally Doyle prefers to take pictures unseen. 'Being polite

and (asking first) doesn't get you there. By the time you've asked

for permission, the moment has usually gone.'

News photographers envy this unseen presence, a privilege sel

dom available to the snapper with a time deadline and a driving

need for a close-up. Eamonn Farrell of the Photocall agency says:

'To get the kind of stuff Bill did you just had to melt into the back

ground and let what was going on unfold in front of you. The

point is that you were unobtrusive. With the size of cameras we

have to use there's no way we could be that inconspicuous.'

An inner-city background, a democratic outlook, and the legacy

of 'concerned photo-journalism' fostered Doyle's empathy with

ordinary people performing everyday tasks. This was the social

documentary territory of weekly magazines such as Life in the US

and Britain's Picture Post and Illustrated in their pre-television hey

day. By 1951 Life alone was selling 5.2 million copies each week.

'Television has killed the photojournalist That's the reality of it,'

he complains, mindful too that aggressive cost-cutting has cur

tailed the careers of several leading newspaper exponents.

Doyle's own idol was the powerful but volatile American W

Eugene Smith. 'I think he was one of the greats. But he was a dif

ficult man. He died at sixty, penniless. But he always said: "You

must try and see the world like a child sees it for the first time."

86 IRISH ARTS REVIEW AUTUMN 2005

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PHOTOGRAPHY

IMPRESSIONS OF A CITY

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.63 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 20:41:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

PHOTOGRAPHY

IMPRESSIONS OF A CITY

My mother used to say: The trouble with Bill is he's drinking Guinness instead of champagne...

Pretty good isn't it?' When Smith worked for Life magazine in

1948 it had thirty-six staff photographers, six picture editors and

ten assistants. Today, bombarded daily by PR and freelance pic

tures, several London newspapers have largely dispensed with

staff photographers altogether.

Born in 1925, Doyle was one of three children of a city bar

man who worked in various hostelries including the Gresham

Hotel on O'Connell Street. They lived in Synott Place, near the

tiny Phibsborough home of playwright Sean O'Casey. Bill left

school early but resumed study part-time at Skerry's commercial

college. 'That was a compensation for me not doing my Leaving

Cert. We hadn't the money. I used to say my mother had me

walking at six months because the bottom fell out of the pram.

People would say: "Lucky you had a pram".'

He worked first for a ships' chandlers, getting ?8 a week - a good

wage at the time. 'It was busy -

ships were queuing up in Dublin

Bay.' He moved to selling insurance because it carried a pension ('I

hated it') until a breakthrough that allowed him turn his hobby into

a career. He won first prize in the Daily Telegraph magazine's 1967

photo competition. Its editor told him: 'You beat about 2,000

English guys to win. They were very good at photographing a white

egg against a white background, but you had the imagination.'

His entry captured scenes of remote rural Portugal from a

cycling tour, from cattle-droving amid dust clouds in the Estrela

Mountains to a beach scene cleverly observed through a cur

tain of drying fishing nets. He won a Leica camera, ?500 (then

more than a year's wages for many) and a Kenyan holiday.

There he slept in the same bed once used by the Queen of

England. 'My mother used to say: "The trouble with Bill is he's

drinking Guinness instead of champagne..."' Further awards

8 8 I

IRISH ARTS REVIEW AUTUMN 2005

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followed in Japan, America and Germany. Back in Dublin he

crossed his career Rubicon when a friend with a commercial

photo business in St Stephen's Green, sensing he was restless,

offered him a partnership. Doyle was now also building his

Dublin street life collection that has since become a history fol

lowing reconstruction, the tenement populations' rehousing in

satellite towns, the city-centre apartment boom and new young

blood from abroad. Doyle instead saw shabbily dressed urban

poor amid a decaying grandeur of lilac weeds growing out of

boarded-up Georgian buildings. He now sees overtones of

regret in those pictures of Dublin's slow decline up to the mid

1990s: 'But at the time I was more aware that I had only "x"

minutes at lunchtime to shoot them.'

From 1965 Doyle began accumulating startlingly vivid images

on the Aran Islands. 'I decided this world from (John Millington)

Synge would soon change and I would have to capture it.

Virtually all the people I photographed have died since.'

These were definitive images of island life: men in spun-wool

trousers held up by the traditional woven-belt, or 'crios'; wet black

currachs (pitch-coated canvas, rowing boats) laid out like gleaming

beached dolphins, or carried high by seemingly headless figures; and coffins being made and then delivered -

by bicycle.

Monochrome textures, open Atlantic light, and Doyle's unerring

eye for powerful contrasts give these photos an immediacy that

makes paintings of similar scenes seem romanticised.

His Island Funeral series was taken on Inis Oirr on a brilliant

summer's day when sea and white sand reflected the light

upwards so the primary colours - the women mourners wore red

skirts and black shawls against a cobalt-blue sky -

radiated a

Mediterranean intensity. He recalls: 'I followed the mourners

and I knew I had to be discreet because the thing about photo

graphing people on Aran is - they're almost like Arabs in this -

they don't like being photographed.' It would be years before the

public saw more than the occasional Aran print by Doyle accom

panying someone else's features. The photographer was long

reluctant to risk book publication lest poor reproduction under

mine the quality of the images.

Timing is paramount in Doyle's photography. He agrees with

Henri Cartier-Bresson's dictum: 'At the moment you press the

button your heart, your mind and your visual awareness all

become one'- "a bit like sex really",' smiles Doyle. Though taking

pictures since the 1940s and ploughing the same furrow of every

day human dramas, Doyle makes clears the late Frenchman was

not a direct inspiration: 'Cartier-Bresson was not well-known in

Ireland back then,' but was the chronicler of street life he feels

closest to in subject and instinct.

What seems extraordinary as he prepares for a major retro

spective exhibition at Sydney's Maritime Museum next March is

just how much of Doyle's 10,000 archive images have yet to

appear in book form. These unseen portfolios span Iberian

pageantry in 1954 Algeciras, portraits of virtually every major

post-war jazz musician to play in Europe, life on Tory Island, off

Donegal, and the 'shawlies' of Cork City (working class women

wearing traditional shawls). H

ALAN MURDOCH is a freelance journalist based in Dublin.

8 The Palace Bar, Fleet Street 1980

10 Merchants Arch

1976

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