Published in Dublin by D1 in 2014, Eamonn Doyle’s lowercase-titled i is the photographer’s first photobook and the opening volume of his work on Dublin’s streets. Its protagonists are anonymous, solitary pedestrians—often older people, photographed from behind as they move through pavements and thoroughfares. Doyle turns away from the spectacle and social incident commonly associated with street photography, concentrating instead on figures absorbed in their own passage through the city.

The photographs were made at close range, yet they preserve the subjects’ privacy. Faces and identities recede; posture, clothing, stride and the surrounding ground become the carriers of meaning. Doyle has described being drawn to figures that suggested the austere human presence of Samuel Beckett’s world. That affinity is visible not as literary illustration, but as an attention to isolation, endurance and the ambiguous drama of an ordinary body in motion. Each image catches a brief encounter while leaving its possible story unresolved.

Across 74 pages, recurrence gives the book its structure. The repeated viewpoint encourages close comparison between gestures and surfaces, while the tall hardcover format—approximately 34 × 24.5 cm—grants these passing figures an unexpectedly monumental presence. Designed and produced by Niall Sweeney and Nigel Truswell at Pony Ltd, with printing by MM Artbookprinting in Luxembourg and binding by Van Waarden, the publication treats sequence and manufacture as integral to the photographs rather than as neutral packaging.

For collectors, i merits attention as a precise early statement of Doyle’s photographic language and as a carefully coordinated artist’s book. This first, numbered edition was limited to 750 copies. Its significance rests not only on that documented format, but on the way subject, scale and repetition recast familiar Dublin streets as a stage for private, unknowable lives.