New Book - Back West

Back West is what the locals call the area beyond Dingle. Bordered by the mountains and the sea, it's a place of stunning natural beauty, rich cultural heritage and ever-changing weather and light. People have been drawn to here for a long time, evidenced by the artefacts from multiple millennia still left in the landscape, and a massive tourism economy in more recent times. I first visited the place in 2005, and was an immediate convert to the wild beauty of the region. Anybody interested in the outdoors will find something to enjoy here - hillwalkers, photographers, water-sports enthusiasts, naturalists, and historians, as well as everyday tourists open to engaging with new and beautiful places. I made regular visits during the ten years after that first trip, and moved to the area in 2015, for what was meant to be a year of immersion in the place before going back to Cork to settle down into a more normal life. I'm still not sure what exactly I meant by the second part of that sentence; probably a job I wasn't particularly interested in and a house in the suburbs, similar to the world I grew up in. Ten years later I'm still Back West, and still enjoying the fact that I can open the front door and find myself in the kind of surroundings I used to spend hours driving to and from in years gone by. With twenty years since my first visit and ten years of living here it seems like a good time to put together a book of photos of this little region that's fascinated me for so long.







The initial plans for this book focused solely on landscape photographs, given that that's always been my main interest with a camera. The landscape west of Dingle is inherently dramatic, and is complemented by the wild weather the place is regularly subjected to. All of my early photography trips focused on the wilder parts of the coast and the mountains, where I would actively seek out scenes that were free of human artefacts. But as time went on and I explored more of the area I began to better appreciate the human influence on the landscape. Away from the rugged cliffs and the open hills (themselves in an entirely unnatural condition due to a long history of human activity) I began to see the photographic potential of the simpler scenes that form a better sense of the overall character of the place. The simpler scenes of small fields and old farm sheds, and how a boreen could draw your eye through a cluster of cottages, or a mountain could form the backdrop to a townland, putting the human elements of the place in context to their wider surroundings. And that change in thinking eventually led me to want to include some of the humans themselves, people who are out and about in the landscape, relating to it rather than living their lives separated from their surroundings. It was a nice excuse to seek out interesting and often like-minded people, and a good challenge photographically too. I'm not all that used to making photos of people, but it's something I'd like to do more of in the future.





I have a long list of dream photos I never got to make before the book went to print. It's hard to draw a line under a project like this, knowing I could live for another fifty years and still be waiting on the right conditions for some of those photos, not to mention the other ideas that will come to mind in the future. There's a lot going on in this small little area, and I hope I'll always be excited to keep trying to get to know it better, and getting some sense of it on camera.





You can buy the book in the shop.