Dublin

Dublin is where I was born, where I live, where I work. It’s the backdrop to everything — the city I’ve been photographing for longer than I can remember, from every angle a camera bag and a commission can get you into. Boardrooms and building sites, hotel bars and public parks, grand atriums and awkward mezzanines, the kind of alleyway that only a Dubliner would know to cut through.

I’ll be straight with you — Dublin is not the most conventionally beautiful city in the world. It’ll never trouble the top of those lists. The Georgian stuff is genuinely lovely, and there are corners and moments that stop you in your tracks. But there’s also a lot of render that’s seen better days, some fairly grim concrete decisions from various decades, and a skyline that’s more accidental than designed. Dublin knows this about itself and is largely unbothered by it, which is one of the things I like about it.

What Dublin has — and this is the actual thing — is people. And a collective peculiarity that’s hard to describe to anyone who didn’t grow up inside it. The wit, the warmth, the complete inability to take anything entirely seriously, the strange pride in the place that coexists with constant out-loud criticism of it. The way a stranger will tell you something funny and true in a queue and then disappear forever. That’s Dublin, and it shows up in photographs if you’re paying attention.

I’ve been lucky enough to see sides of the city that most people don’t. Access that comes with the job — buildings mid-construction, venues before the doors open, events as they’re being built and as they’re winding down, businesses and the people inside them. Dublin is a city that rewards looking at closely, even when — especially when — it’s not putting its best foot forward.

All of which means that when clients need photography in Dublin, they’re working with someone who knows the city the way you only can from living and working in it for a lifetime. The light at different times of year, the locations that work and the ones that look better in person than they photograph, the rhythm of the place and how it changes from one part of the city to the next.

It’s not a perfect city. It’s my city. I know where the good stuff is.

Available across Dublin and beyond — but Dublin is home.