Éamon Mac Dáibhí

In a world where everyone takes snaps, I find myself returning to two questions. What makes a photographer? And what makes a photograph, rather than a snap? Then I go out and look for those answers.

I have spent much of my life working in creative fields: animation, theatre, film and television, fine jewellery. That work took me far from Erin. Like so many Irish people before me, I emigrated: first to America, where I spent fifteen years, then to China, where I lived and worked for a decade. It was a life I could hardly have imagined when I set out, and in many ways it has brought me full circle.

When I was an Irish emigrant in New York, I missed home terribly. I had a photograph of Ireland printed, a print I could barely afford, and then spent even more having it framed. Whenever work or worry got on top of me, that picture on the wall was where I went for comfort. It brought a little of home into a life lived far away.

I have never forgotten that feeling. And I hope the prints here might do for someone else what that photograph did for me.

Through all the different chapters of my life, what has stayed with me is the act of looking. For more than fifteen years, I have worked professionally as a photographer, initially in commercial and product photography. These days, my camera is increasingly turned towards my own land, and the quiet poetry of everyday life.

There is something about Ireland, and Kerry in particular, that keeps drawing me back out with my camera. The changing skies, the restless Atlantic, the ancient contours of the land, the way light can transform a familiar place in a matter of moments. Nothing here is ever quite the same twice.

I work in both black and white and colour, depending on what a place reveals to me. Sometimes it is the drama of the light; sometimes the texture, contrast and silence that emerge when colour falls away. I am less interested in simply recording a view than in capturing something of what it feels like to stand there, in that place, at that moment.

I live in Kerry with my family, and there is always another road to follow, another sky gathering on the horizon, another light that might never come again.

These prints are moments from that ongoing journey. I hope they bring a little of Ireland's wildness, its stillness and its enduring beauty into the homes where they hang.

For me, it has never really been about finding something new to do. It has been about learning, over time, to see.

And to keep looking.