For 20 years he hardly picked up his camera – now Martin Parr is a fan and the Beckett-inspired Dubliner is the talk of this summer’s Arles photography festival
Eamonn Doyle is an unlikely candidate for the title “saviour of street photography”. When he began photographing old people passing by his front door on Parnell Street in Dublin in 2011, it was the first time he had used a camera in more than 20 years. Now 47, he had graduated with a photography diploma in 1991, but “I hadn’t really taken any photographs or read any books about photography since I’d left college,” he says, “and I certainly wasn’t trying to reinvent the genre, because I really wasn’t aware of street photography except for a few 60s photographers like Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz that I’d read about back then.”
