The Aran Islands

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.