Photography by Jack Caffrey.
For a while now there has been a pull toward Midwest America. Capturing desolate lands with little people, open roads with nothing but fields and animals. However, Ireland being a short 40-minute plane ride away offers all of this and more. Go to the middle of the countryside in Ireland and you can capture the essence of loneliness. You can get the perfect balance of people, age and loneliness.
Photographers to look to who do exactly this, Jack Caffrey. An Irish photographer who aims to travel Ireland capturing it exactly how he sees it. You can’t add people to a frame. And often shooting a landscape poses more issues than having a person in front of the lens ever will. Unless you get the photo exactly right, exactly how you see it then it will ruin the feeling you’re after. However, Jack Caffrey brings in an amazing feeling, he brings you there, you know how the location feels. You can imagine the world around him and the people who live there. All of the strange stories people may tell but also how it lacks a feeling of anything.
Ireland I’m afraid to say has often been forgotten about. Just going to somewhere like Leitrim, the people are amazing. They are interesting, funny and curious. Yet, they won’t leave. They are curious people. A feeling of loneliness unlike any other. A sense in a sad and tragic way that it is missing a vital part. People. However, I wouldn’t want it to change. The landscape is perfect. The details and curious corners, places you could walk for miles on end. Someone like Jack Caffrey has a superb talent. Being able to see something that people who have lived there for 50 years simply cannot. He has a modern eye onto an old landscape. His images are timeless because the location is timeless. The dark saturated colours and electric, against the dull grey Irish sky’s with roads that are empty.
A world away. Jack Caffrey uses his lens to capture Ireland how he sees it. Like many photographers it is a forgotten art. Mobile phones have paved the way for easy photography. Something that has taken away the preciseness, looking in for the right angle and light. Using a camera shows a new light, life through a lens that a phone wouldn’t pick-up. Having someone like Jack Caffrey shoot Ireland and the loneliness of it which also shows the people as they are is a superb insight into culture. How cultures and places that seem so close together can be worlds apart.
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