Exhibition showcases portraits and personal stories of Dubliners

By Cate McCurry, PA

An exhibition showcasing popular portraits and personal stories of Dublin residents is being unveiled on Thursday.

The project, being exhibited at the DLR Lexicon in Dun Laoghaire, is part of the Human of Dublin social media page, founded by Hungarian photographer Peter Varga.

The project features 60 portraits of people sharing personal stories, which Mr Varga has collected over the last 10 years.

Born in Budapest, Mr Varga moved to Dublin at the age of 19.

Over the last 10 years, he has been approaching thousands of people on the streets of Dublin to speak about their lives.

In 2016, he published a bestselling book and created multiple exhibitions.

“I used to work in a coffee shop and I was bored of asking the same questions all the time,” he said.

“After a while, the conversation can become one-sided or one dimensional, so for my solution for this was to memorise all the regular customer orders, and I thought about the meaningful questions to ask them instead of the small chat.

“Because of that, I had lots of meaningful conversations with the regular customers, who would come back often just to have to continue conversations from where we left off.”

He said that chatting to people and taking their pictures are two things he truly enjoys.

“I wanted to be a photographer, I never had a professional camera in my hand before, but I was taking pictures and my dream was to become a photographer,” he added.

“So combining the two together of talking to people and taking pictures of people, Humans of Dublin was born.

“I was just literally out on the streets every single day for six hours taking pictures and interviewing people and posting them on my page.

“After about nine months, a couple of my stories went viral. Obviously, it was a huge bump on the viewership and different organisations and people started to get in touch with me to raise awareness through real life stories.”

He added: “To mark the 10th anniversary of the project, we will have 60 A1 portraits and the best stories over the past decade on display.

“It’s a selection of the most powerful stories. While I was setting up the exhibition yesterday, there were a couple of people who read the stories and some of them laughed out loud, and other people were crying, depending on which stories they were reading.

“I’ll pick up some tissue boxes as it’s really an emotional roller coaster.”

The exhibition will launch of Thursday at 6pm at the DLR Lexicon in Dun Laoghaire.