Screens of fortune : a photo-essay

Abstract

Technology is at the heart of this. That's an ambivalent and perhaps even vaguely threatening thing to say, so I shall explain. It was thanks to technology – social media, predictably – that in 2017 I ‘reconnected’ (a word, and experience, so of the moment) with Kirk Kenny. The first and last time we met was in the summer of 1998 in Sligo, both of us drawn to the West of Ireland by a love of the poetry of W. B. Yeats. It was, of course, a decidedly paleodigital world ‘back then’ – that world of books, letters, newspapers, and film photography, unalloyed by the more intrusive manifestations of technological development that we have come to take for granted and, indeed, now depend upon. A world so recent and which yet would seem so strange were it to return fully.