If you go down to the woods today...
Saturday March 28 2009
With a curtain of leaves opening to reveal a forest wonderland and one lucky explorer centre stage, there's a real sense of CS Lewis' curiosity about this photograph by Anthony Byrne (www.anthonybyrne.net). Simply entitled Girl in Forest, it features in No Directions, a diverse new photographic exhibition by Byrne showing in the hip Back Loft gallery in Dublin's St Augustine Street this weekend. The show will then move to London in April.
Byrne will probably be better known to you for his work behind a film camera rather than a stills camera. As a filmmaker, he has been responsible for a similarly varied body of work, from the award-winning short film Meeting Che Guevara & the Man from Maybury Hill to his debut feature film Short Order to the RTE drama series Single-Handed.
And Byrne has recently finished shooting the much-anticipated screen adaptation of Edna O'Brien's novel Wild Decembers.
No Directions actually marks his photographic debut and features images taken in international locations, from Morocco to Israel, Paris, New York, Dubai, Madrid and Havana, and not forgetting his home town of Dublin.
If there is a theme to this diverse show, it is the sense that all the subjects have been caught in a moment. And Byrne has been working on it over the past two years, when he wasn't directing or developing other projects.
"I started as a filmmaker through photography: creating stories from still images and letting my imagination do the rest," explains Byrne.
"Photography is where I have complete autonomy. I don't have to rely on scripts, producers, actors or crews. I don't have to wait on anyone. It's just me and my camera."
sgorman@independent.ie
