Rarity 16.8/100 · Collector 0/100 · Deal 28.79/100 · Listings: 2 · Avg price: $59.87 · Min price: $43.56

These scores use the legacy monthly asking-price aggregate. They do not use the new exact-edition, condition, completeness, and destination-shipping rules.

From a regular position on Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge, Arthur Fields photographed passers-by from the 1930s across roughly half a century. He is estimated to have made 182,500 photographs: couples marking early dates, visitors spending a day in the city, parents with newborn children, match-goers, and countless others pausing before his camera. The repetition of place gave Fields an unusually sustained view of Dublin’s public life, while the variety of encounters kept that view open to different generations and social worlds.

Compiled by Ciarán Deeney and David Clarke, *Man on the Bridge: The Photos of Arthur Fields* draws its material from photographs submitted by their owners, accompanied by captions and personal accounts. This method distinguishes the book from a conventional retrospective. The images are not presented solely as works extracted from a photographer’s archive; they also survive as objects kept by the people depicted. Personal memory and public record therefore occupy the same pages, allowing individual occasions to accumulate into a collective portrait of the city.

Fields’s consistent working position makes gradual change legible. Clothing, gestures, leisure, family life, social habits, the surrounding streetscape, and even photographic technology shift across the sequence. Yet the pictures are held together by the straightforward exchange between photographer and subject. Their significance lies less in isolated spectacle than in recurrence: the same bridge, the same basic transaction, and a changing population passing through the frame.

Published by The Collins Press in 2014, this 239-page hardcover gives substantial form to a body of Irish street and portrait photography rooted in everyday use. For collectors, its interest extends beyond Fields’s prolific practice. The collaboration between photographer, compilers, and picture owners offers a distinctive model of the social photographic archive—one in which vernacular keepsakes become evidence of urban history without losing their private meanings.