Outside the Inside
Aidan Kelly

Outside the Inside is a newsprint photobook of Aidan Kelly’s ThisPlace project. Centred around Dublin City and its inhabitants, it features numerous portraits of Dubliners of all kinds, their lives and the city where they exist.

‘I wanted to sum up the changes over the last twenty years or even more, of both Dublin’s life and my own, in the process of getting older, Feeling dislocated sometimes, I personalised the city as men do ships or rivers and imagined a woman who co-incidentally didn’t love or want to talk to me anymore. Not unlike say a government representative that cares only for your concern if it’s election season. In order to change ‘her’ mind I send her supportive and sometimes honest messages using the cityscapes as a backdrop to lettering in my own hand. There is also a subtext under the work that looks at these issues of a two-tier society, mental health, loneliness and displacement with the feeling that one doesn’t belong in big cities. That maybe we just fade into the crowd but we should not forget to speak up and renege against that, be better at ourselves and help with the progress that we all know is fairly due to us.’ – Kelly on ThisPlace.¹

The photographs have been collected over the past eight years and come together in this book which is a small snippet of his work so far on the ThisPlace project. Outside the Inside also includes an interview with Kelly and an essay on his own work.

Mainly practicing in street photography, Kelly combines a media element via text and double exposure to add a narrative that extends the idea of missing parts of a scape or atmosphere to the story.

‘Any city that has gone through changes or the loss of liberties or the basic needs that keep us all together I think can show in these moments. Hopefully it helps to remember that what we deserve will eventually come around to us and taking snapshots of the world around myself is my way of finding out my place in the process.’ – Kelly on the presence of Dublin city in his work.
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