For six months between 1965 and 1966, the German-born photographer Evelyn Hofer labored in Dublin, creating superbly crafted portraits of the town and its individuals. Hofer took her time composing every shot, whether or not it captured a pair of housekeepers briefly repose or James Joyce’s loss of life masks. The outcomes had been revealed in guide kind in 1967, to accompany an prolonged essay by V.S. Pritchett. Now, in DUBLIN (Steidl, $58), these pictures stand on their very own to inform a considerate story of the town each in black-and-white and in quiet colour.
Hofer, who died in Mexico Metropolis in 2009, was raised in Switzerland and Spain earlier than settling in New York in 1946, the place she contributed picture essays to Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. In 1959, she started crafting literary portraits of cities, collaborating with Pritchett in addition to Mary McCarthy and Jan (then James) Morris. In a letter to Pritchett, Hofer mirrored on Dublin as an island “crowded with individuals who appear to stay a life stuffed with fantasies, creativeness, speak — but lonely, suspicious of one another, on the defensive — and but extra in a position to stay inside themselves.” These depths and contrasts are mirrored right here.
