“In my day-to-day life I’m kind of scared of colour,” says Eimear Lynch. For an artist who creates incredibly vibrant images, it’s an interesting stance. “I never wear colour. For Girls Night all the dresses were so colourful and very similar, so that worked well. I like to have my photos warm but with dark shadows. It allows you to see more of the emotion of the person.”
Girls Night is Lynch’s first photo book. It documents the lives of teenagers in Ireland heading off to discos. It’s brilliant, tender and fun. The rising London-based photographer is now working on a new body of work, expanding to document the lives and cultures of girls and young women around Ireland.
Lynch grew up in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow. After studying media at college – “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do” – she worked for Not Another, the talent agency that emerged from Emma Fraser and Dean Ryan McDaid’s Nine Crows vintage clothing store, and is now hugely influential across fashion and casting, its roster working with Dior, Calvin Klein, Missoni and more.
“I started taking photos because we needed photos for the models,” says Lynch. “Dean, who’s a photographer, just taught me, and then I realised it was something I really liked to do.”
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I think after a while they’re so in their zone before they go on that, hopefully, they forget that I’m there
— Lynch on photographing Fontaines DC
When she moved to London in 2018 she worked in a bar while shooting agency models on the side. “I just loved that one-on-one experience with someone. I’d have a model come to my flat, we’d hang out, take some photos. I loved that dynamic of learning about someone, and taking photos as you go. I think the person, the subject, is the most important thing.” She also assisted the acclaimed fashion photographer Tim Walker, “which was such an amazing experience”.
Last year Lynch moved to Paris, but she found herself creatively listless there. “I love Paris as a city. It’s very fun. Everyone is so relaxed. It can feel like no one has a job – everyone’s just drinking wine and smoking cigarettes ... Paris is the main character. Everyone who moves there moves to live the Paris life ... As a photographer I find that quite uninspiring. Everyone’s too good-looking or too cool.”
So she returned to Ireland, moved back in with her parents, and dedicated herself to the Girls Night project.
“Living away from Ireland, you can pick and choose your memories and how you feel about it ... It’s got harder and harder [to come back to Ireland], because my friends have moved on, or a lot of them have moved away to Australia.”
Lynch found herself wanting to make work that connected with memory and, though focused on a new generation, somehow reflected “the great times I had with my girlfriends growing up, to celebrate that time”.
For Girls Night she contacted as many discos around Ireland as possible, shooting at venues and in bedrooms around the country. “I think there’s a part of me and who I was as a teenager in the images,” she says, “especially in the shy-looking girls, or the ones who look a bit uncomfortable in the scenario. That’s how most people felt as a teenager, I think: very uncomfortable socialising and being out for the first time.”
Lynch has also acted as tour photographer for Fontaines DC. Although she doesn’t see herself as a music photographer, she has managed to capture the essence and energy of a band on the road. “We had some mutual friends in Ireland, and then they moved to London,” she says of working with the band. “We just started hanging out, and they asked me to go on tour with them. It wasn’t something I tried to get into, but it’s something I really enjoyed.”
Unlike a traditional tour photographer, Lynch focuses primarily on what happens offstage, showing the band in intimate moments: resting during cigarette breaks, jamming in dressingrooms, preparing to go on stage, decompressing after a gig. “I love taking the behind-the-scenes photos for them, for the same reasons for all my work: it’s just to show a more honest view of the person.
“I’m very lucky in that I’m able to get that access. They’re comfortable around me, in their dressingroom, before and after gigs. I have a way of shooting them where I fade into the background. I think after a while they’re so in their zone before they go on that, hopefully, they forget that I’m there.”
Lynch has wondered about shooting another band. She’d love to work with The Last Dinner Party. “I’d love to see what a girls’ tour bus feels and looks like, the girls doing their make-up, and how they are before and after gigs. The Last Dinner Party have such good outfits, the photos would be great. Abigail [Morris] is an unbelievable frontwoman. Her stage presence is insane.”
In February, Dazed published an extraordinary series of Lynch’s photography from the All Ireland Irish Dance Championships in Killarney. They show her trademark style: the almost luminescent colour palette; unguarded moments in a context that demands precision; the space between action and relaxation; and dancers stretching and applying make-up – along with almost confrontational portraits of steely glamour.
This is the alchemy of Lynch’s work: drawing from a context that is essentially iconic – teen discos, Irish dancing, a rock band – while finding a slightly off-kilter but beautiful perspective, with an overdose of colour that should, in theory, create a layer of artifice but in fact exposes authentic emotion.
Lynch is grounded about the warm reaction to the book. “I’m very surprised that people actually cared,” she says. “I would just love to keep making books, do long projects. I loved going back to Ireland and focusing on a project.” The process of dedicating herself to the work, she says, “is the main thing”.
