About the Book
The place of the horse in Irish life is well established. It is interwoven with other influences to create “the Irish culture” and is part of our personality as a society. For the uninitiated this world is a contradictory mix of the elegant and the bizarre. With the turn of the head a scene can move from the majestic to the strange (in all forms of that adjective; odd, surprising and unfamiliar). This is also a story of social ritual and behaviour. Every week there are equine events up and down the country ranging from race meetings to show jumping to hunts and to fairs, and each event attracts its own particular crowd, with their own idiosyncrasies.
It was not possible to go to every event and the places I chose to go during this project were the ones that interested me from either a social or historical perspective. While this work is by necessity both selective and partial I do hope that is also fair in its portrayal. I hope that it captures the present day spirit of this tradition, as well as the contrasts between the different elements that make up this part of Irish culture. The photographs are sometimes documentary, sometimes satirical, sometimes cliché and occasionally eccentric. After all, this is the reality of what I found.
Robert Doisneau said that photographs are like snatches from eternity, a two hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there. Even though this project took a year to complete and involved travelling over 8,000 kilometres to many events in many different locations, the total exposure time for all the photographs in this book (my snatches from eternity) probably amounts to less than a second; a mere heart beat in which I have tried to capture an honest flavour of the different strands of this great Irish love affair, and perhaps provide a glimpse into our national soul.
David O’Flynn
The place of the horse in Irish life is well established. It is interwoven with other influences to create “the Irish culture” and is part of our personality as a society. For the uninitiated this world is a contradictory mix of the elegant and the bizarre. With the turn of the head a scene can move from the majestic to the strange (in all forms of that adjective; odd, surprising and unfamiliar). This is also a story of social ritual and behaviour. Every week there are equine events up and down the country ranging from race meetings to show jumping to hunts and to fairs, and each event attracts its own particular crowd, with their own idiosyncrasies.
It was not possible to go to every event and the places I chose to go during this project were the ones that interested me from either a social or historical perspective. While this work is by necessity both selective and partial I do hope that is also fair in its portrayal. I hope that it captures the present day spirit of this tradition, as well as the contrasts between the different elements that make up this part of Irish culture. The photographs are sometimes documentary, sometimes satirical, sometimes cliché and occasionally eccentric. After all, this is the reality of what I found.
Robert Doisneau said that photographs are like snatches from eternity, a two hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there. Even though this project took a year to complete and involved travelling over 8,000 kilometres to many events in many different locations, the total exposure time for all the photographs in this book (my snatches from eternity) probably amounts to less than a second; a mere heart beat in which I have tried to capture an honest flavour of the different strands of this great Irish love affair, and perhaps provide a glimpse into our national soul.
David O’Flynn