As a photographer, Aidan Kelly uses both traditional analogue and digital techniques to create works that draw on street photography but also offer a commentary on his native Dublin and how it has evolved over the years. Below, he introduces his latest project No Ordinary Love, showing at Rathfarnham Castle this July and August.
Seeing a camera for the first time was fascinating. Everyone has access to a camera phone if you think about it; now, we're in a place where there's no need for these intricate machines, but there are diehards like me. Those rangefinders and single-lens reflexers, the possibilities they represent. They may or may not still contain all those ghostly memories. Has everything been deleted? I don't believe it and still don't fully understand how it all works, but there were moments of half-second movement, noise, clarity, a click, and then silence. It just works for me.
Out of love and loyalty, cameras hung around. Out of love and loyalty for my uncles, who are long gone now, they all had their boxes of magic; they saw my face, and they dealt me in. It became second nature to see flashes of a world around me that I felt was both distant and yet a part of. It is an outsider mission I'm on. The idea is not to forget but to use the camera as a means of remembering.
Ireland has a billion or more stories from great people, all travelling at the speed of the movies. It has fallen to me, saying this with caution, as a photographer here in Dublin, to catch as much of it as I can.
As an artist, my work combines traditional analogue and digital elements to create pieces that draw on street photography and portraiture while also offering commentary on the world.
I used film quite a lot at the start, and now I use digital more, but the handwriting as a graphic is all my own, with discrepancies intact, possibly due to dyslexia as well. How it has evolved over the years and how I have grown with it - from being consumed by everything most days to the point where I drift off, like a dog looking for a ball.
The project - named No Ordinary Love - attempts to reckon with these ideas and changes to the city, the personal relationship I have with Dublin and essentially how I feel about myself.
I'm not good with confrontation. It can be strenuous to see on a relentless basis the sound of many anxious people in so-called positions of influence shouting at each other across working-class streets and the benches of old, male-heavy halls of parliament; they look forward to their pensions more than their legacy, there's always a generous hand-shake somewhere just not for care workers who need an answer to public waiting lists.
I sometimes feel let down by Dublin; why do initiatives in some parts of the city take an age, while others seem to happen so quickly that you miss them?
There's that story in my family history [alongside the cameras in travel bags] when we saw Haughey on the screen mumble something about belts and tightening and hearing my mother, a hard-working tailor, perk up and say, "That shirt he's wearing is dear, like Arabian cotton!" That entitlement made me think—a reason to get out of bed.
I'd be as concerned as any other artist, and we are all doing our best, that the world is in a strange place. Now more than ever, specific ideas need to emerge to keep any city moving in a good direction so that everyone gets a fair chance at having a good feeling about where they live, the daily reason to keep going, to work at something that keeps the relationship with the city they live in, Inspiring.
Using the idea of a relationship where the city and powers that be take the form of a lady, a woman not unlike Anna Livia or Molly's wheel. She may or may not carry a hammer in her bag. It feels like we're awkwardly distant. I write her messages, hoping there's still love. She takes her time to get back. She's knocking heads. As ever, she might have left the city with some new vulture fund bloke. She reads the words I send but ignores the texts, like sleeping all day during a lockdown, or maybe like a government spinner in a free Karaoke bar that's too loud, Sorry, can't hear the phone, or on the street, brushing past, doesn't have time to answer impertinent questions.
Among this work, another series set around the centre of the universe, The Spire, ties in with the idea of everyday people waiting and hoping for a change in a city in flux. Who are the people in the photographs, all their beautiful faces a little tired, waiting on a friend or partner, trying to get on with it, seemingly taking the jobs that we might not want? They are more than colourful; they have songs and stories written all over those tired and waiting faces.
The great Joe Caslin and I discussed the idea that we can't depend solely on the people we vote for; we have to do more work together. I heard once that if you're talking to someone who doesn't respond. Just leave it be.
I sometimes feel let down by Dublin; why do initiatives in some parts of the city take an age, while others seem to happen so quickly that you miss them? With a camera, such a defenceless object that would shatter easily if dropped, I'm trying to record and expand on these ideas that say something with a story, a trick, push buttons, something you might need to look twice at.
Collected here to celebrate an exhibition at the wonderous Rathfarnham Castle, I hope this work might do justice to the family tradition of those service industry men with their cameras, stepping in front of a million situations like mine that I thought mattered, many times of uncertainty I argued my way into photographs and then out of them with my inherited father's charm, telling some story, that, all will be remembered well.
No Ordinary Love is at Rathfarnham Castle from 15th July - 31st August - find out more here
