A Portrait of a Village (1996 - 2016)
Laytown, Co.Meath Ireland
In the summer of 1996 I started to photograph the small, seaside village where I grew up, a year before I moved to London. I wanted to capture daily life as I knew it; the people, the surroundings and the essence of provincial life. I wanted to process the world that I had known so far. Although this was the environment that shaped me, I didn’t share the desire to stay. I wanted to experience more than village life had to offer and to see what lay beyond the confines of a small community.
I continued to photograph every time I returned home, over a period of twenty years. For most of this time, little changed. Time passes, people carry on, and the cycle of life continues. Although there is an underlying feeling that ‘this is it’, there’s a comfort and charm in close-knit neighbourhood. The familiarity of local faces and characters, a sense of belonging and a safety in the known.
Fast forward to 2026, this village is a very different place. The people in the community didn't need to move to a new world, the new world came to them.
