Daily Photo: The Guinness Factory & The River Liffey
For a long time, I didn’t particularly like this photograph. I was in Dublin, wandering around with a camera, and somewhere along the way I had the opportunity to cross the River Liffey and photograph the famous Guinness gates. I didn’t. At the time I was with extended family and the idea of making the effort seemed slightly unnecessary. I had already seen plenty of photographs of Guinness, and I was quite happy wandering the streets on my own side of the river. Sometimes, apparently, I can be remarkably efficient at talking myself out of taking a photograph.
It was only later, when I looked back at the images from the trip, that this one started to grow on me. There is something almost ridiculously Irish about the combination of the Guinness brewery and the Liffey. If someone had asked me to put together a photograph that summed up Dublin without resorting to leprechauns, shamrocks or a man playing a fiddle in a pub, this would probably have been somewhere near the top of the list.
The photograph itself is a little more complicated than simply pointing a camera at a brewery. The Guinness buildings sit behind the old brick wall, while the Liffey provides the reflection in the foreground. The bare winter tree sits almost perfectly in the middle, tying the two halves together, and for once the river was actually behaving itself. It was still enough to give me a reflection without requiring me to do anything clever.
I suppose that is why I’ve come back to this photograph. It reminds me that photographs don’t always reveal themselves immediately. Sometimes you take one because the opportunity is there, forget about it for years, and then discover that the photograph you almost didn’t bother taking has quietly become one of the better reminders of where you’ve been.
And, in this case, it is difficult to get much more Dublin than Guinness, the Liffey and a tree that looks like it has been standing there wondering what all the fuss is about. It also gave me a reason to visit the Guinness Factory next time I was in Dublin.
