From an unsettling project by Irish photographer Eamonn Doyle entitled A Silence Of Their Own.
This “mugger’s-eye-view” seems on first glances to imbue the images with an antagonistic tension, as if the shots were taken a split second prior to some violation – perhaps symbolic as much as physical – of the “proper” distance between photographer and subject. Thus, it might be easy to read into his images an essentially pornographic aesthetic – that is to say, a mode of representation in which a simulated proximity to the represented becomes a fetishistic token of, and replacement for, the real itself. Yet to read the images in such terms denies a critical dimension to them, a dimension of epistemological humility that reveals them as both profoundly ethical and politically radical.
Crikey.
A Silence of Their Own (Eamonn Doyle)
