Marcus Doyle : Intimacies of an Unblinking Eye

Marcus Doyle was born in Carlisle, Cumbria, a suburban parcel in the north of England, on October 26, 1972. He recalls watching his grandfather, a painter, create pictures. The young Doyle was fascinated as much by his grandfather's technique for rendering light as by the subject matter of the paintings. By the time he was 12, Doyle had found his own way of capturing Cumbria's northern illumination—with a camera. "Where I grew up, in a housing complex, all the houses were the same, but they were surrounded by hills and fields and trees," Doyle says. "And I think my style of photography has always been there—the first pictures I took were landscapes, never really much in the way of people or portraits. I would photograph trees with houses next to them, typically long exposures, although I didn't have very much technical knowledge at the time. But I instinctively knew how long to expose the film, and how to correct it in the printing." Although he graduated in 1995 with honors and a Bachelor of Art's degree in photography from Lancaster University in the North Sea town of Blackpool, Doyle has remained very much an instinctive artist, relying less on technology than on a straightforward technique. He uses no filters, nor does his work indulge any of the computer manipulations of today's digital photography. Indeed, Doyle sticks exclusively to film, lately relying on a Wista large-format camera with Schneider optics. His emblematic saturated colors result from lengthy, tightly apertured exposures on slow-speed film. Doyle has had several one-man shows, including "Isolation London" and "Dumped London", and his work has recently been featured at The Photography Show, Paris Photo, Photo LA, Photo San Francisco and Photo New York. A portfolio of his early black and white work was also featured in Black & White magazine.Doyle, Marcus is the author of 'Marcus Doyle : Intimacies of an Unblinking Eye', published 2005 under ISBN 9780977141500 and ISBN 0977141500.