Product Description
Hardcover, reprint from 2006 of the 1999 edition. Doyle visited the islands ( all three are featured) many times, and most of the images here date from the 1970's ( but many have a timeless quality, without ever being twee or touristy.
Small area of chipping to the paper jacket on front cover in upper left hand corner, and nearby associated area of laminate peel. Small water stain to lower edge of first two pages ( relatively minor) .
This portfolio of 160 stunning photographs, drawn from the Aran Islands since the early 1960s, chronicles and records the daily life of the islanders: their seasons, harvests and festivities; their schooling, religion and politics; their fishing, folkways and pastimes. Photographic sequences depict events in the Aran year – St Bridget’s Eve (1 February) and St John’s Eve (11 June), the blessing of the currachs, the cead (a form of hurling) – and portraits of the Aran poets, Sean Keating the painter, and the coffin-makers of Inis Meain. These timeless, crystalline images by a master-photographer reconstitute and preserve a unique, largely vanished way of life in the most majestic of settings on Ireland’s western seaboard. An introductory essay, ‘The Light before the Object: Bill Doyle, Photographer’, by broadcaster and documentary film-maker Muirís Mac Conghail, accompanies the photographs.