Dublin photographer Sarah Doyle has a gift for creating striking images. Since graduating from the University of the Arts in London, where one of her tutors was the acclaimed iconoclastic photographer and film-maker Mark Lebon, she has established a singular reputation both at home and abroad for her work.
Regularly profiled in the art and culture magazine Aesthetica, as well as Acumen, the magazine of the Galerie Joseph in Paris, her wide-ranging list of clients includes the Abbey Theatre, Brown Thomas, An Post, Sony Music, Universal Music and the Galway Arts Festival
What marks her out is a distinctive and energising use of colour, form and often surreal graphic style. Her portraiture tends to be mostly in black and white. “I see myself as a photographer who makes art,” she says, explaining how her love of colour is instinctive, “a place where I can express myself and create my own world. It has endless possibilities and combinations, and each one has a story to tell.” Her favourite colour is blue. “I almost always start my pictures with blue. I love being in the studio on a dull day and working with a vivid blue. It transports you to a new reality.”
Her exhibition Make the World Go Away at Atelier Now in 2021 displayed her compelling visual arrangements and intriguing storytelling skills. Everyday objects in strange placements – a tiny pink staircase going nowhere on a blue background, a supermarket wire basket forlorn on a solid red background, a green clothes peg on an undulating base – make these images a conversation with objects. “It was a response to the visual overload of work and about creating your own world,” she says.
READ MORE
Her many portraits have included activist Sinéad Burke (for the cover of the Observer magazine), actor-director Antonia Campbell Crawford, singer CMAT with whom she has worked for years, and President Michael D Higgins, for which she was shortlisted for the Zurich prize in 2022. It now hangs in Áras an Uachtaráin.
This shoot, prompted by her interest in the work of Dublin stylist Eoin Gavin, is a joint personal project rather than a commercial one. “I wanted to do something with Irish fashion with freedom and experimentation. I feel it is essential to get things fresh and open. I love working with models and casting; I see them as artists and treat them as such. Abby [the model in this shoot] is great company, playful and open. It’s important to make space for people to bring part of themselves, and I feel that is something that I do.”
The clothing, selected by Gavin, includes pieces by avant-garde designers such as Cosima Augustin and Laura Barrett, recent graduates from Limerick School of Art and Design, textile designer Sadbh O’Neill, knitter Ariane Sloan of University of Ulster, along with high-street finds. Doyle’s composition, colour and gaiety encapsulates it joyful spirit. “I am more interested in style than fashion,” she says.
Her influences are wide ranging – she cites photographers like Diane Arbus and Sarah Moon as inspirational, and admires how much Moon, a former model, could capture the essence of a garment. “I photograph every day. I absolutely love it and it’s an addiction that I just can’t get over. The thing about photography is that you have to take pictures all the time to find the one you want.”
Her next project, focusing on the Irish draught horse, is to feature in a French photographic magazine later this summer. Her images of the animals, capturing movement, muscularity and shape, are commanding. “I have a passion for the Irish draughts and started taking pictures of them at the Dublin Horse Show just before Covid. What I find appealing about them is their combination of strength and gentleness, beautiful in any creature. [Such projects] give me some respite working away from commercial work.”
- Photographs Sarah Doyle @sarahdoylephotographer
- Styling Eoin Gavin @eoin.gavin
- Hair and make-up Lisa Redmond @lisaredmondz
- Styling assistant Genevieve Fakunle-Bakare
- Model Abigail @MorgantheAgency
