SALZBURG.- Ireland and Austria are roughly the same size in terms of land area, but Ireland has only half the population. Nonetheless, the Emerald Isle in the Atlantic Ocean is characterised by an exceptionally vibrant output of fine art photography.

With this exhibition created in collaboration with the Gallery of Photography in Dublin, FOTOHOF is offering an insight into Ireland’s current fine art photography scene. From the many Irish works submitted for the SOLAS Photography Prize of the GOP and Source Magazine in autumn 2015, seven Irish photographers were nominated for the exhibitions in Dublin and Salzburg:

Ciarán Óg Arnold’s Going out, looking to score a woman is a no-holds-barred look at night life in Ireland. It features scenes from a provincial town’s grimy pubs, frequented for the most part by the unemployed in search of happiness, alcohol, and relationships.

Enda Bowe’s photo series is characterised by the ‘conscious’ perception of his home town. Starting from the Gaelic term Teannalach (awareness), he went in search of the ‘aesthetic of the ordinary’ and found it in the people, locations and natural setting of his immediate surroundings.

Eamonn Doyle’s photographs from his series ON stand out by virtue of the dark, contrasting black-and-white in which he depicts passers-by in the centre of Dublin. Doyle is an innovative exponent of contemporary street photography with a distinctive style that captures people in urban settings caught in a remarkable moment.

In her work entitled Fallen Women, Emer Gillespie explores the fate of single mothers who, in a country as strictly Catholic as Ireland, were forced – until a few years ago – to hand over their children for adoption the moment they were born. Through her photographs and archive material she describes the absurdity of these societal constraints and the tragic fates of so many women.

Shane Lynam is well-known for his large-format landscape photographs. For the exhibition in Salzburg he has selected a number of insightful scenic colour photographs of the city and the outskirts of Dublin from his cycle Inner Field.

In Project Cleansweep Dara McGrath explores military history. It is exactly one hundred years since the British military first began experimenting with all kinds of chemical weapons and testing them at various sites. McGrath has photographed a number of them, showcasing objects, research material and interviews, and raising the question of the impact these experiments still have today on the environment and on people.

Yvette Monahan’s meditative and filmic photographic work The thousand year old boy focuses on a young boy and coastal landscapes in the west of Ireland, where a skeleton dating from the Bronze Age was discovered in a cave in June 2011. The DNA from the bone remains was compared with that of the population now living in the sparsely populated area, and it yielded precisely one hit – the young boy.

Twenty topical photo books from Ireland add an important facet to the exhibition. They were selected by the curators of the Gallery of Photography, Tanya Kiang and Trish Lambe jointly with FOTOHOF and represent the multilayered complexity of Ireland’s contemporary photo scene.