West Chapter ConferenceSpeakers

Marcus Doyle

Saturday, November 08, 2025 @ 11:40am,

Penumbra

The photographs of Marcus Doyle transform the familiar spaces and landscapes of the modern world into twilight zones; nearly surreal, almost alien, yet always recognizable for what they are...Doyle's large-format approach, with saturated colors that result from exposures as long as three hours, turns his upstaged tableaux into visions of exalted expectancy amidst man's tendency to trivialize. Indeed, it is as if these easily overlooked spaces are awaiting the arrival of nothing less than an intergalactic mother ship. But Doyle doesn't strive for any rhetorical or ironic effect, although his photographs are rich with aesthetic ironies. Photography, after all, is fundamentally about light, yet for the most part Doyle photographs darkness, painstakingly capturing the fugitive illumination that is always there yet often invisible to the naked eye. Just as ironic is the rigorous absence of human figuration, yet all of Doyle's deserted landscapes have been impinged upon by human development, urban sprawl or feeble gestures that aim to reincorporate the natural world where man has more or less rolled over it.