A Cork based photographer has spent the last seven years capturing the action of Gaelic club games in unique surroundings around Ireland for his work Gaelic Fields.
Paul Carroll has created a photography documentary focusing on the backdrops of fields and grassroots games throughout every county in Ireland. Starting the work in 2010, he travelled over 50,000kms focusing exclusively on club games.
It features the beauty of games played on the fields of Aran and Inisturk Islands, South Kerry and the Glens of Antrim to the urban landscapes of Cork, Dublin and Belfast and scores of locations in between.
Carroll took in football, hurling, camogie and ladies football games across the country in what turned out to be a mammoth project. He is now running a Kickstarter campaign to turn the work into a photography book.
It’s the first photography documentary to focus exclusively on grassroots Gaelic games and the locations they are played.
Carroll realised that Gaelic games had never been captured in this way in Ireland before and set about exploring the rural and urban grounds which bind communities together around the country.
“We Irish can take for granted the amazing locations and beauty in every county on the island. We tend to romanticise and enjoy Ireland more when we are away,” Carroll said.
He set out to explore the different locations of Gaelic clubs and the identity they bring to communities. What he discovered will be common knowledge to people within small Gaelic games communities everywhere:
“The club is a local support system which accommodates all social levels in both urban and rural areas. During the 7 year period it took to create Gaelic Fields, clubs have withstood a recession and the mass emigration of many of its young players. It’s a vibrant and important grassroots movement.”
Carroll had to balance the project with this work with at risk youths and homeless people in Cork. That didn’t deter him from travelling what ended up being a distance greater than the circumference of the earth-within Ireland-capturing Gaelic games and their locations.
On one of these trips he put down his camera for a team that was short a few players. He played one half of one game, scored a point and afterwards went to work a nightshift.
“For 30 minutes of a game I became part of my own project!”
The book is due to be released in late November. As part of the Kickstarter, people who pre-order/pledge to buy the book are encouraged to give their thoughts on what community, identity and their club mean to them. Some of these submissions will be used in the book.
He is now running a Kickstarter campaign to turn the project into a photography book (link to https://www.kickstarter.com/