About this photograph
A street seen through a rain-soaked window, every building softened into something half-remembered. Some days in Kerry, this is the only view there is.
The south-west is the wettest part of Ireland, and the rain here comes in more kinds than English has words for. Irish does better: báisteach is rain, ceobhrán is the fine drizzle that soaks you without seeming to fall, and lá fliuch, a wet day, covers a good part of the year.
This photograph doesn't fight the weather. Taken through a window running with rain, it turns a passer-by, a doorway and a street lamp into shapes that drift and run like a watercolour. It is the most abstract picture in the collection, closer to the memory of a street than a record of one.
Anyone who has sat in a car or a café in Ireland waiting for a shower to pass will know this view at once. On a modern wall it reads as an abstract black and white print. To anyone who knows Kerry, it reads as home.
