If you look up Dublin on Google Images, you get Temple Bar and Trinity College, the river and the castle. Postcard stuff that screams, THIS IS IRELAND. But so is the sick carved relief of a Great Horned Owl on O’Regan’s pub, and William Street’s soggy poster wall with its boombox-rocking banana. I’m not anti-landmark, I’m just pro-minutiae. Most of the pictures I take in foreign lands are of random details, lovely or cutting or funny, winking at me and demanding to be kept. Somehow they feel more like the place than the monuments.
Scrolling through my capture of eight September days on the Emerald Isle, I noticed some patterns in what caught my eye.
From the Dublin sidewalk, I saw the king of beasts through the window of a Georgian residence. Nothing else in the room was visible, no other clues to who was behind such a singular delight. Back in the city a week later, I turned from the chaos in the LEGO Store to look down on Grafton Street. Even knowing the scene, the flower hawkers and buskers calling to passersby under umbrellas, the fullness of it was obscured. Looking in or out of windows, we can only see so much.
Doorways are something I photograph anywhere I travel. Both invitation and boundary, they are eye-grabbing portals. A gritty street in Cork and a centuries-old garden near Kilkenny offered doors of beautiful intrigue. One with hard lines and harsh colors under cloudy grey, and the other all soft whimsy in the autumn glow. This land belongs to my ancestors, and I loved seeing all its faces.
Urban architecture is so much fun in Europe because it’s schizophrenic. The ancient mixes with the contemporary, the stately with the tacky. With over 1,400 candles on its birthday cake, Cork embodies that multiplicity. So many buildings made me look up, and these two were as different as they were oddly echoic. My sister Jeanne and I could not peg the sculptural elements above the Turkish barbershop (ultrasound views of a Fomorian from Irish legend for $300, Alex). The Art Deco figureheads on the cocktail bar were obvious, but the scale and positioning of the burnished ornamentation stirred similar attraction.
A fluthered father and the father of Western philosophy, framed by dark wood in the belly of The Celt and the Long Room at Trinity College. The Celt is a gloriously ramshackle Dublin pub known for live music, and the Long Room is the most stunning library I’ve ever seen. The latter is a holy place, home to some of the oldest and most precious books known to man. In both settings, you can feel the history soaked into every surface (sometimes including whiskey).
Brick, sharp lines, faces. An accidental graffiti clown and Samuel Beckett, the Irish writer who championed the Theater of the Absurd, blending dark humor and profound sadness over the futility of human existence. These environments were opposite – a grimy alley and the smart lobby of historic hotel Number 31 – but of course I see a sameness. They say the best clowns are the saddest.
My stepfather David is a photographer, and we’ve talked about the power of catching someone in a moment, never knowing they’re in your lens. This candid snap of Jeanne happened inside a museum exhibit. She was looking down at her phone, trying to check us in for our flight home, because she is always taking care of us. Of me. The light illuminates and seems to come from her, everything some keen shade of blue. In stark contrast is my unadulterated cheese on the rainy street that evening, ice cream in hand and Helveticahaus shirt blazing. The scrawled heart was one of many I spotted along the way, and posing with it felt exactly right. I am prone to following my feelings. Is fearr rith maith ná droch-sheas (a good run is better than a bad stand).
