Tony O’Shea was born in County Kerry in 1947, and for thirty years he returned to that county each year to follow the Kerry Beagle drag hunt. Kingdom of Hounds, published by RRB Photobooks in 2023, is what those returns produced: huntsmen, hounds, hard weather and rough ground, photographed from within a community rather than from the far side of a commission.

The Kerry Beagle is among Ireland’s oldest native breeds, and in this book it is not simply a motif. Bred and trained by local huntsmen — many of them O’Shea’s neighbours and friends — the dogs push into strong river currents, clear high hedges and work uneven terrain with a concentration that rarely seems to slip. O’Shea gives that endurance its full weight, and gives the society around it its own grain: families who have bred and trained hounds across generations, and rivalries between neighbouring hunts that are nearly as old.

His position matters as much as his subject. Working inside a place he knows, O’Shea records what an outside photographer would likely miss — kinship, labour, competition, celebration — and moves between gruelling conditions and quieter communal moments without forcing drama onto either. The interest is in how people live, closely watched and unsentimentally registered.

The book appeared in 2023 with a launch and signing at Photo Museum Ireland, placing it alongside O’Shea’s other sustained Irish projects. For collectors of Irish documentary photography, its claim rests on duration and access: a subject revisited over three decades by someone with roots in it, and a sequence that accumulates rather than asserts.