TITLE: Éire i Dubh Agus Bán

Éire i Dubh Agus Bán – Ireland in Black and White

This series is not a travelogue, nor a celebration of scenic beauty. It is a personal, meditative journey through the Irish landscape — seen not as background, but as presence. Each image was created slowly, often in solitude, across months of walking, waiting, and listening to the language of light, stone and silence.

The project began as a visual ode to the southern coast of Ireland, but evolved into something more internal: a monochromatic dialogue between land and self, where every horizon becomes a mirror and every shadow a threshold. The choice of black and white was not stylistic, but necessary. Colour distracts; light, in absence of colour, reveals.

Inspired by the tonal mastery of Ansel Adams and the emotional gravity of Sebastião Salgado, my work seeks to honour both the technical craft and the poetic resonance of image-making. These eight photographs were selected from a larger body of work — my first solo exhibition — titled Éire i Dubh Agus Bán, meaning Ireland in Black and White (in Irish Gaelic). They are fragments of a larger silence, verses of a visual poem dedicated to presence, memory, and elemental beauty.

The land depicted here is wild, but not empty. It remembers. It speaks in textures and contrast. I did not come to document it, but to be with it. To dwell. To learn how to see — and how to stay.

This is not just photography.
It is a way of listening.

AUTHOR: francesco de pace (Ireland)

Photographer & Visual Poet

Francesco De Pace (b. July 20, 1983, Taranto, Italy) is an Italian-born photographer based in Midleton, Ireland. He holds a BA (Hons) First Class Degree in Photography from the University of Chester, and is currently completing an MA in Photography at Falmouth University. His visual language is rooted in the tradition of black and white fine art photography, drawing inspiration from the clarity of Ansel Adams and the emotional depth of Sebastião Salgado.

Francesco’s work focuses on places where light and silence meet: windswept coastlines, ancient valleys, reflective waters. Through long, meditative fieldwork and a refined printing process, he seeks to express not just the appearance of a landscape, but the internal resonance it awakens.

In 2025 he presented his first solo exhibition, Éire i Dubh Agus Bán – Ireland in Black and White, a year-long visual exploration of the Irish landscape and its emotional undercurrents.

Alongside his photographic practice, Francesco teaches photography to Transition Year students at Midleton College, where he introduces young people to the craft of visual storytelling and the discipline of observation.

His practice continues to explore the thresholds between presence and memory, vision and feeling, always seeking, in the stillness of an image, something that lingers beyond the visible.