One shot at a vanishing world

Curiosity, speed, and a little luck - Bill Doyle tells Aidan Dunnehow he captured 'the decisive moment' in his classic photographs of Irish life

Visit Bill Doyle's retrospective at the Gallery of Photography and you are likely to be surprised by how many of the images you recognise. In his half-century or so as a photographer, he has notched up more than his fair share of iconic pictures. His main achievement is to have captured the essence of an Ireland that was, even as he worked, disappearing. There is a remarkable sense of pre-modernity to his photographs taken in the 1970s and even the 1980s, as though he was scouting the streets for the last vestiges of an Ireland that was.

Not for nothing is he known as the Irish Henri Cartier-Bresson.

He's a fully paid-up subscriber to Cartier-Bresson's doctrine of "the decisive moment", the art of being in the right place at the right time, with fast reflexes. Ideally, the subject or subjects don't even realise he's there, and sometimes, even when they do, they affect indifference.

"I never use a motor drive. It's too noisy, and anyway I only take the one picture. It's all in the speed of the draw."

He has worked mostly in black and white.

Throughout his career he's favoured the street photographers' camera of choice, a Leica, and he's also used a Rolliflex with its larger-format negatives.

"I was using a Rolli, then I bought a Leica, and after that I won a Leica, and someone said, 'you know, now Doyle is breeding Leicas'."

He is not one for hardware, though. His ideal camera is as discreet as possible.

Doyle is a remarkably spry 82, and he keeps up a non-stop patter with the practised ease of a seasoned comic. It's a persona that must have been invaluable in terms of disarming those on the other side of the lens.

He is not a bit shy about pointing out that he received no professional training. Born in Dublin in 1926, he went to school in Marlborough Street and attended commercial college on St Stephen's Green. Thereafter, he worked with a firm of ship's chandlers, a job he hugely enjoyed, not least because his employers were exceptionally agreeable.

"This was after the war. It was a busy time, there were boats queuing up out in Dublin Bay to dock," he says.

He is less benign about his spell with an insurance company and shudders as he recalls selling insurance.

While he's been based in Dublin all his life and is known for his photographs of Irish subjects, he is a restless soul. "I've always been curious," he says. "If there's a corner, I want to know what's around it."

He recalls, as a youngster of about 10 years old, setting off with his younger sister "with the go-car" one morning from their home in Charlemont Street.

"We didn't reappear until the evening," he says. "And my mother was saying, understandably, 'so where in god's name were you?'. And I said we were somewhere called Dundrum.

"Which we were. We just kept going and ended up in Dundrum, which at that stage was like a country village. That was it: keep going around the next corner."

He joined an Óige and, in the postwar years, travelled throughout Sweden, Norway, Spain and Portugal.

"That's how I met my wife. She was a wonderful girl and we had great times, but she died when she was only 38, from breast cancer. I've never stopped missing her," Doyle says. He has a daughter.

He is still fond of Portugal (not least, he says, for the port) and Spain. In Madrid, towards the end of the 1950s, he visited the Prado, where the works of Goya, Velásquez and other Spanish painters completely bowled him over.

"I didn't know why," he says. "It only occurred to me later that they were all social painters, they painted the society around them, and they would appear in their own paintings."

He recalls a phrase from something he read at the time that struck a chord with him: "The social implications of the photographer." Later, he saw an exhibition of the American realist painter, Edward Hopper, who was one of the first painters to convey vividly the daily reality of life in the big city, with its distinctive atmosphere and character, its own settings and rituals.

"I loved Hopper, I'd say he's very Bill Doyle, you know, in that that's what I was trying to do in my photographs, to get the way people are living, the way society works."

While he was at first an amateur photographer, he was never an aimless one. Always, he says, he went out with a sense of mission. "It was a self-instilled discipline."

He is, as he emphasises, a "one- shot photographer", partly out of practicality. "I wasn't earning a lot, and film was expensive," he says.

Around 1964 he went to the Aran Islands to take some photographs and, a few years later, decided to enter them in the Daily Telegraph Magazine Photographer of the Year Award competition.

"You had to do a 500-word story and I put in 20 pictures with captions," he says.

To his amazement, he won, even though he was up against formidable professional competition. It was a turning point in every way.

He's been back to the islands many times, though the whole way of life he managed to depict - in which costume, customs and the physical fabric of the place were pretty much as they'd been at the turn of the 19th century - has irrevocably changed.

"Synge would have recognised it when I started to go there, but not any more," he says.

Was there a moment when he turned from amateur to professional? Not exactly. "A friend had a little photographic studio on Stephen's Green and she said: 'Would you not come in and work with me? You'd be mad not to.' So I did, and it was great."

As a working photographer, he did anything and everything, and always his lively curiosity seems to have carried him through.

One of his most striking images is of a hooded woman sitting on a pew in the church on D'Olier Street.

"I'd been over to the GPO and it started to lash rain, so I nipped into the church to shelter for a minute and I saw that woman sitting there," he says. "But I didn't have my Leica, so I dashed up to the Green to get it, and back again, and she hadn't moved a muscle. I just took the one shot and I don't think she even knew I was there."

He likes the darkroom and notes that particular images are a joy to print, while others are more problematic. For this show, and indeed for a long time, he's worked with Hetty Walsh, a black-and-white photographic printer of some renown who is based in Kinsale. She's previously printed the photographs for three of his books. Prints of the work in the show, of archival quality, are for sale at surprisingly reasonable prices, though they are not in limited editions.

Doyle's humour is often self-deprecating, but he is deadly serious about his work. He remarks on subtle compositional points as he looks at the prints, on how a slight change of angle (a tiny bit more space in between two currachs, for example) can make or break a picture. Many years ago the graphic artist and designer, Jan de Fouw, said to him: "Bill, you photograph ideas, not things." He acknowledges this may be true, but says that, in the end, what is most important for a photographer is not ideas, or even a camera. "It's luck. Luck is just so important. And I've been lucky."

• Bill Doyle's Ireland: A Retrospective Exhibition continues at the Gallery of Photography, Meeting House Square, Dublin 2, until Jan 31