Young Men With Big Beards

 
Forty years ago, beards were a portent expression of free-living free-loving radicalism of 60’s counterculture. They were seen by the mainstream, to be dishonest, mutinous and generally, career suicide.
However, with the increasingly casual nature of the workplace and the back lash against metrosexual grooming, beards are seen to define male fashion in the noughties.

“Young men with big beards” emerged from observing the growing trend for facial hair amongst men between the ages 20 to 35 around Dublin. The portrait project started to capture this zeitgeist and to study the beard wearers through large format photography.

The images were shot on 4x5 black and white film with the same studio lighting set up for each beard. Each shoot was a study of the sitter, each in the same pose showing a small amount of the sitter’s clothes. A pattern started to emerge, that big beard wearers are non-conformist and have grown their beards with conviction.