Since his first major television project as a photographer on “Normal People,” Enda Bowe has been a regular on film and TV sets, developing his own cinematic style and visualizing the inner dialogues of the actors and their characters. He tells Anna Cafolla how, whether photographing scripted scenes or authentic moments shared between takes, he doesn’t change his approach—he renders it all in the same tender, golden light, blurring the line between fiction and reality.
It’s five years on from “Normal People,” director Lenny Abrahamson’s culture-shifting television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s book. Starring Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, it imbued the universal experience of youth and all its complex emotions with a sense of importance and tenderness. It also marked Enda Bowe’s first major television project as a photographer. “During the making of ‘Normal People,’ Lenny and I often talked about the concept and understanding of internal dialogue and visualizing it,” says Bowe. “We’ve all cried and laughed, we all have stuff going on. We have hope, positivity and difficult feelings—that’s what I’m always trying to capture.” The Dublin-based photographer reflects on the heartbreaking scene where Mescal, as Connell, breaks down in a therapy session: “It is a privilege of my job to witness moments like that, the raw emotion. You can’t help but feel moved. Tears rolled down my face.”
As the axis-spinning show went stratospheric, Bowe’s publicity photos buoyed its aesthetic and feeling, while intimate on-set photographs showed the stillness before scenes, bursts of laughter and fleeting moments as the clapperboard snapped down. “I’ve returned to his photographs often,” Abrahamson previously said, “when I feel the need to be reminded of that extraordinary relationship that can exist between the looker and the looked-at.” Bowe’s Solas Photography Award-winning and Deutsche Borse Foundation Photography Prize-nominated project At Mirrored River was actually used as a visual reference before Abrahamson asked Bowe to come on board. The project is a quiet, powerful meditation on life in a small, industrial Irish town—inspired by the Gaelic word ‘Teannalach’ which means “awareness.” Ordinary lives, their dreams, hopes and possibilities, stare right back at you.
Bowe grew up in the Irish midlands with his own internal dialogue looming large. He spent a lot of time in the west of Ireland as a child with his grandparents, often wandering the wild, windswept shores, and later found himself drawn to it as an adult even when his life and travels took him far away from home. It was the emotional landscape of his grandparents’ homeland, its quiet depth and ordinary, untamed beauty, that partly shaped his perspective and work.
“The stillness there really resonated with me, and the awareness of presence you get with rural people and places,” he says. “Big emotional spaces, the green fields and that rugged coast, build bigger emotions.” As a child, the limitations of epilepsy often kept him on the sidelines, fostering a more introspective and observant nature that still comes through in his work. He would see his mam, a school teacher, photograph the kids on their first Holy Communion days with his nana’s twin-lens reflex camera. “She was the first person I saw organizing a shot, capturing a moment,” he recalls.
Bowe went on to study art in Blackpool and moved to London at age 22, frequenting the Prince Charles Cinema. Three films across the 90s sharpened his focus: Mike Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies,” Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Three Colours: Blue,” and Lynne Ramsay’s “Ratcatcher.” “They all capture a sheer rawness and take you on a journey that touches your heart,” he says. “I was jealous! How could I ever get that feeling, that cinematic quality, in my own work? Those filmmakers opened up a reality to what l was trying to achieve within my personal work, and set me with a lifetime challenge.”
Bowe found himself building a personal style from how narratives were shaped in film and music. He recalls visiting the Rothko Room at the Tate and Barnett Newman’s paintings as monumental inspiration for his rich use of color. “I think, sometimes, being from Ireland meant it took me a long time to shake off the grey light we’re so used to,” he says with a laugh—today being just as murky-toned. He seeks out projects in bright light, tones that play out in the most resplendent moments of “Normal People,” now made his signature. “It may not always be in an optimistic setting,” he says, “but I like to use the color to take away the darkness from certain settings.”
For “Small Things Like These,” the film adaptation of Claire Keegan’s book which Bowe knew “inside out,” starring Cillian Murphy, was where Bowe could “really see the blur between fiction and reality.” “I’m photographing the feelings and journey of Bill, not Cillian. You’re not seeing the Oscar-winning actor, you’re seeing Cillian tell Bill’s story using every emotion in his body and heart,” he says. For Bowe, art, artifice and the act of human emotion pulse to the same rhythm. “I don’t see any difference when I’m photographing Paul as Paul Mescal or Connell, or Brian in ‘God’s Creatures,’” he adds. “They hold narratives we all have as people. You want to deliver something that touches those same emotions.”
Seeing actors and their approach to craft encourages Bowe to keep “raising his own game”. “I’ll only get a minute or a few to get that picture [including the “Small Things Like These” shot of Murphy that became his first feature film poster],” he says, “but my communication and ability to distill exactly what I want from a photo has only improved from working with these wonderful, giving actors.”
Although we speak while Bowe is back home in Dublin, having recently moved back from London, he continues to work on a personal project on Rome’s suburban edges, “A Roman’s Road.” He’s traveled back and forth now for three years. This project is shot analog like all of his personal work, capturing a true “cinematic way of thinking.” He’ll send photos to his partner, Jen, who will write short scripts and narratives around them. “I’m making my own film in stills,” Bowe says. It’s what makes for a transient, captivating, filmic oeuvre. “Being in the darkroom, creating large prints and physically engaging with the final image feels—more than anything else—like a true act of craft. For me, a photograph is always a collaboration, a gesture of recognition, and respect for another person’s journey and shared humanity.”
One of the great 20th century Irish novelists, John McGahern, wrote that “the ordinary is the most precious thing in life.” That sentiment—for finding poetry in the most prosaic moments—is what Enda Bowe articulates in his luminous, emotive images. Whether on a film set, shooting in the suburbs of Rome or across Belfast’s community lines, the Dublin-based photographer catches the light, golden and optimistic, and finds hope in the humans he lenses. “It could be a famous or an unknown actor, or a person in an everyday moment,” Bowe says. “I approach all images with the same intuition, led and directed with empathy.”
