Ireland

This text presents powerful photographic images of Ireland that captured the mind and soul of Agnes Pataux. The text, by novelist and critic Colm Toibin, introduces the reader to the outstanding landscape of Ireland through literary evocations.

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Agnes Pataux has travelled extensively throughout Ireland, photographing its ancient, majestic, nature-dominated landscapes. Her photographs - intense and solitary - speak to us of the primordial forces of nature, forces that have shaped both the extraordinary natural environs and the psyche of an enduring people, the Irish. Pataux is bound to particular sites, attracted by geological formations and manmade phenomena: the famine walls of the 1840s; the rugged Burren coast, blanketed in grey limestone, crisscrossed by splits and cracks that form a haunting geometry; Connemara with its wild and desolate bogs; County Antrim where nature has created the monolithic, hexagonal-shaped stone pavements of the mythological Giant's Causeway; and the coasts of the Aran Islands with their high cliffs beaten and broken by endless waves. Finally, the portraits of the men of these Emerald Islands show a people profoundly marked by their environment - one that has shaped the people, the one that the people in turn have shaped. All remain as indelible traces of an ancient past.
These powerful images that have captured the mind and soul of Agnes Pataux are presented here through eighty stunning duotone photographs. The text, by novelist and critic Colm Toibin, introduces the reader to the outstanding landscapes of Ireland through literary evocations.