The Copper House gallery was full to the brim with people for the first day of DUPA’s (Dublin University Photography Association’s) end of year exhibit on Friday, April 25th. The exhibit ran from the 25th to the 26th, and it was a fabulous debut night. There was no theme for this exhibit, which the exhibition coordinator, Ella O’Brien, says is tradition. It is simply an opportunity for anyone to submit and be given a chance to share their art with the world.
Walking through the bright, spacious gallery, viewers encountered a magnificent variety of perspective, color, place, and passion. In the spirit of the kaleidoscopic event, the music provided by the duo Kate Mason and Robert Phillps was a fun blend of electronic and classical piano music.
“You can just tell they know each other so well, they mesh so well. Immediately when I knew I wanted to do something funky for music, I reached out to them,” said O’Brien.
There were 110 photos on display, and each was a stand out in its own right. It seemed as if the world had been brought to this one gallery space in Dublin, as each photographer cast a lens on places both at home and abroad.
“Carnival” is from Senior Sophister student, Sophia Glanney, and it depicts a dancer from the Malta Carnival. Sparkling and vibrant in her stunning costume, she seems to be caught in the moment before a smile.
“I literally ran around asking these strangers if I could take their photo, knowing that I would never see them again. I’m glad I captured a moment like this,” said Glanney when talking about her delight at stumbling upon the carnival, and the opportunity to photograph the participants.
Another photographer, the Senior Dark Room Officer, Henry James, took “Ballontanic” at the Hot Air Balloon Festival in his home state of Connecticut. James brilliantly captures one of the balloon operators moving through the hot air balloon, the contrasting blue and yellow stripes spiralling to a point behind him.
“To me it’s interesting because it’s a perspective you don’t get a lot. When you see a hot air balloon, you see it from the outside, and while that’s very beautiful, this was something I had never seen before either,” said James.
The Camino Primitivo, the Camino de Santiago’s oldest route, is the subject of Rory O’Sullivan Sexton’s “Somewhere in Northern Spain”. It was a favorite of James’s for the way the light streamed through the trees of the “beautiful, foggy woodland,” as Sexton described it.
“There were a couple of over nights where we didn’t sleep, and a couple of early starts, doing about 30 Kilometers a day through some of the most beautiful parts of Northern Spain. So I don’t know where that is, I wouldn’t be able to find it again if you asked,” said Sexton.
There is that sense of transience in the photo, as with many photos in the exhibit. Of fleeting moments and past time, especially as so many photos were taken while travelling, of strangers never to be encountered again.
Maria Keeling, a Senior Sophister student, caught a stranger in a moment of peace in ‘The Voyage to Railay”. He was her boat guide from Thailand’s mainland to the Phi Phi islands, and she said, “We didn’t get many words out of him, but he had quite a presence.”
That is the quality so many of the photos of the exhibition shared – that sense of presence. That the essence of a person or place was truly being communicated through a brief snapshot in time. Each photo was moving in its own way, and there were so many more which were not able to be showcased, but in an effort to give a platform to even more photographers, DUPA decided to end the magazine hiatus.
“In the past it’s just been photos that we included in the exhibition, so it was more like a program. This year we wanted to platform as many photographers as possible, and we thought the best way to do that was to make a magazine. Most of the photos in it are not in the exhibition itself, so we thought it was a great way to showcase photos we didn’t have the funds to print on a large scale,” said O’Brien.
The photo booklets were on offer alongside wine and snacks, and the table was crowded with readers flipping through the pages. The enthusiasm shown was not new for a DUPA exhibit, and the joy at having a moment to gather, take a break from the stress of exams, and celebrate friends and strangers for their photographs, was palpable.
In the end, it was another lovely exhibit from the DUPA committee, and a moving way to close the year, for all who are going, and all who are staying.
