The photographs in Ross McDonnell’s book Joyrider are a coming-of-age story, one where everything and everyone are constantly changing in the midst of…
A cinematographer by trade, McDonnell began photographing young residents of the Ballymun housing estate in Dublin, Ireland, in 2006 after studying film at university. A failed government social experiment in the process of being torn down, Ballymun had become a symbol of Dublin’s underclass, ravaged, as the book explains, “by successive drug epidemics and inter-generational malaise.”
When photographer Ross McDonnell went to cover the ongoing Ukrainian crisis as a freelancer, he felt his photographs didn’t stand apart from the hundreds being produced in the region at that time.
As President Barack Obama is considering offering refugee status to thousands of Honduran child migrants, photographer Ross McDonnell travelled to the Central American country on assignment for TIME to document the growing humanitarian crisis that has forced thousands of people to seek a better life in the U.S.
Joy riding — stealing and destroying cars — is a rite of passage in the lawless but ritualistic world of disaffected youth in Ballymun, a community on the north side of Dublin. In “Joyrider,” through a series of cinematic black-and-white shots awash in light and movement, the photographer Ross McDonnell documented youths coming of age in a world of drugs, gangs and arson.
