The winner of the First Book Award 2015, announced today, is Irish photographer Ciarán Óg Arnold.
Arnold's winning project I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed. but all I could do was to get drunk again is described as "a diary of sorts", charting the haunted figures he encountered over two years following a return to his childhood town of Ballinasloe.
The Award was established in 2012 by Mack, a London based art and photography publishing house and the National Media Museum and is open to photographers who have never had a book published before.
Judge and publisher Michael Mack said: ‘Ciarán Óg Arnold’s project is a heartfelt story of home.
The book is a sincere self-portrait where the boundaries between his own state of consciousness and his photography blur into a compelling document of lives tinged with humour and often brutal sadness.’
Born in 1977, in Ballinasloe, Arnold's visceral photographs were taken over five years.
His work gives the viewer an uncensored and savagely honest glimpse of one aspect of Irish nightlife.
“I never really had a project in mind,” Arnold told the British Journal of Photography.
“I just took the photographs at weekends to have something to do. The photographs are about this fatalistic atmosphere of male negativity. Machismo, and having nowhere to express it.
I wanted to show how something feels, how it looks – to get the emotional desperation and the anger. I’ve never really talked about it with anyone before. It’s hard.
“You would go into one nightclub on weekends, there’d be no one in the entire place except for these guys in the corner with the boxing machine, getting out their aggression on a punchbag and a massive empty nightclub behind them. That was the only place available. I began to do the same thing myself – I got caught up.”
The First Book Award is said to be the world’s leading book prize for emerging photographers.
The nine shortlisted projects for 2015, together with works by winners from the first three years of the award will be on show at Virgin Media Studio, Media Space, Science Museum, London from 20 April – 28 June 2015, Entrance free.
Check out some of the winning photographs by Ciarán Óg Arnold below
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