Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures
Irish photographer and film-maker Seamus Murphy talks with Tyler Cowen about three decades of photographing Afghanistan, why photography distorts as much as it records, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland, life between London and Kolkata, the visual resemblance of Russia and America, his music films with PJ Harvey, and what he looks for in a young person who wants the life he has led.
Key ideas
- Afghanistan’s troubles are mostly imported, not innate. Murphy’s optimism rests on the people — easygoing, poetic, deeply attached to their country — and on the diaspora keeping families alive with remittances; the recurring pattern is an outside power or a self-serving ‘upstart politician’ exploiting a small nation caught between larger ones.
- A photograph is a fraction of a second, not a verdict. The famous green-eyed girl (shot in Pakistan, not Afghanistan) might have been smiling two minutes before and crying two minutes after; the news business selects for the most dramatic frame, so the image the world sees is real but unrepresentative.
- Themes should emerge from the pictures, not precede them. Murphy shoots people, relationships, and incidental beauty without a thesis, then finds the themes in the edit — his America–Russia book fell from 136 images to 88, and cutting changed its meaning and lightened it.
- Russia and America resemble each other despite the enmity. Grandness of design, industrial build-to-last solidity, and a shared dark, serious humour make people from the two ‘natural enemies’ look interchangeable — the conceit behind Strange Love.
- Curiosity beats technique. Asked what he would look for in an aspiring photographer, Murphy dismisses the technical (easily learned, and native to the young) in favour of genuine interest and love of the subject; you must love the work because most long projects feel, for a long time, like failures.
Content
Afghanistan’s optimistic case: the people and the diaspora
Murphy locates whatever optimism he holds for Afghanistan in its people rather than its politics. The Western image of a uniformly conservative, extreme country is, he says, wrong: Afghans are easygoing, harmonious, quick to joke in the worst circumstances, and bound to their country by a love that runs deep in the veins rather than a ‘silly patriotism’. Their misfortune is structural — a small, strategically placed nation repeatedly destabilised from outside, whether by the 1979 Soviet invasion, Cold War arms flowing in (which, ‘by indirect means, created the Taliban’), or Western corruption tolerated through the NATO years. He is pointed that the West, having spent the money and known about the corruption by 2010–2015, cannot disown responsibility by declaring there was ‘nothing to show for it’. His practical hope is internal reform: on his December visit he found younger Taliban, and probably most Taliban, opposed to the draconian bans on girls’ schooling, which he traces to the Kandahar leadership and ‘one or two people’. Power to change things sits with the diaspora and with an eventual internal recalibration the country needs economically.
Photographing Afghanistan: the camera radar and the green-eyed girl
Where Cowen finds rural Mexicans stiffening into an unnatural seriousness before a lens, Murphy finds the opposite problem in Afghanistan: people love being photographed, and possess a ‘built-in radar’ that triggers shouts of ‘there’s a guy with a camera’ the moment one appears, making candid work hard and turning a shoot into ‘a carnival thing’. The craft lies in working around that — talking to a subject until a natural moment arrives, so that images which read as candid were in fact patiently set up. On photography’s power to shape perception, Murphy is unsentimental: news selects the eleventh, most dramatic frame over ten boring ones, which builds a superficial picture even when each image is true. The celebrated green-eyed girl was photographed not in Afghanistan but at the Pakistan border, in a family that had fled the Soviet invasion; the deeper lesson is temporal — the shutter froze a fraction of a second of possible fear, and ‘two minutes before that, she might have been smiling, and two minutes later, she might have been crying’.
Ireland after the Celtic Tiger
Russia reminded Murphy of pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland — the friendliness, warmth, daily struggle, and shared laughter — and he thinks that Ireland survives, chastened. The boom made a ‘pretty shallow place’ obsessed with accumulating property and debt; the crash taught a lesson he hopes has stuck, and the far-right anti-immigrant faction, loud on social media, he found to be a genuinely small minority. He corrects Cowen’s romantic notion that Northern Ireland is the ‘real’, pre-modern Ireland: the South, never industrialised, is simply catching up, and did so by educating itself into ‘possibly among the most educated populations on Earth’ after the brutal 1980s recession that drove Murphy himself abroad. On the collapse of Catholic Church authority — which he likens to having grown up in ‘Taliban, Ireland’ in 1960s Dublin — he offers a house-of-cards account: an institution that abused its power was quietly chipped away at until it became permissible to speak, at which point the truth came out all at once. The church has fallen; religion, he thinks, has not necessarily gone with it.
Kolkata, London, and the itinerant life
Murphy lives mainly in London with part of the year in Kolkata, his Indian wife’s favourite of the cities she grew up in. He loves it unreservedly — ‘Kabul, in a way, was a bit like Kolkata when times were better’ — for its history, buildings, food, and a genuinely widespread intellectual life, embodied in a vast book fair with a tent of hundreds of one- or two-person ‘little magazines’ that survive on real readership, not elite patronage. The city’s decline is legible in its architecture: he photographed Kolkata’s distinctive Art Deco houses, built by middle-class families fleeing East Bengal and the 1971 war, now being torn down for flats because scattered families in Dubai, New York, or London want to cash out while one relative remains. It is ‘slightly a dying city’, deindustrialising and out of step with Modi’s ‘thrusting new India’ — which, for Murphy, is exactly its charm. The itinerant life carries risk: he recalls Syria’s warmth even in 2012 (when he ‘really shouldn’t have gone there’), and in Nigeria two near-fatal encounters within hours, once dragged from a car by a Boko Haram mob after a mullah and a shadowing security policeman defused it, once outrunning a crowd to throw his camera through a moving car’s window and dive in ‘like in the movies’.
Russia and America: an industrial resemblance
The book Strange Love grew from a conceit Murphy formed in 2008, photographing the Russian Far East after years of work in America: the two supposed natural enemies look, and behave, strikingly alike. He agrees that Michigan resembles Russia visually, and points to a shared grandness of design and an industrial, built-to-last solidity — the unchanging American payphone against a world that redesigned its own every few years. Trump’s early ‘bromance’ with Putin revived the old idea, sending Murphy back to the Urals in 2017 and 2019 as an industrial counterpart to his Pittsburgh-area work. His method is the theme of the episode’s title: he photographs people and their relationships without a thesis, because going out with a theme in his head would be ‘quite restricting’, and lets themes present themselves in the edit — the book fell from 136 pictures to 88, a cut that changed its meaning and made it lighter. On the cliché of the unsmiling Russian, he offers that ‘very serious people make me laugh a lot’: the humour is dark, deadpan, and Irish-adjacent — the joke is that you can’t tell it’s a joke.
Working with PJ Harvey on Let England Shake
PJ Harvey found Murphy through his 2008 Afghanistan exhibition and book, which he believes fed into songs she had already written about the First World War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and England. When she learned he had begun shooting video, she asked him to make music films; he abandoned an initial plan to film in Iraq and Afghanistan and instead stayed in England, hunting a visual equivalent of its imperial and wartime legacy across two road trips, producing twelve short films for Let England Shake. The collaboration deepened into The Hope Six Demolition Project, worked simultaneously as he photographed and she took notes and wrote, travelling together through Kosovo, Washington, and Afghanistan on a pact that they would stop if it ever failed to work. Her writing on Afghanistan struck him as unlike anything he had read — ‘an artist’s eye’, small things becoming a whole soul — and offered exactly the different take on the country he wanted. He reads the two albums as having caught Brexit before it arrived: in its simplest form, the nationalism tapped by the lyric ‘God Damn Europeans’.
Spotting talent and the arc of a career
Asked what traits predict success for a young person wanting a version of his life, Murphy sets technique aside — it is easily learned, and the young grew up fluent in it — and names curiosity and a real love of the subject, because the field is brutally competitive and long projects feel like failures for a long time before they resolve. His own arc bears this out: he learned photography not in Ireland but in America, where a bought camera, spare time, and a public dark room let him take a picture and then control it, closing the loop between seeing and result. His breakthrough was a story on working-class Dublin children keeping ponies in inner-city back gardens — a thing he had grown up around but saw freshly on returning from abroad, and which a Swedish newspaper picked up. He closes on the project that has run for over thirty years: a Kabul family he first stayed with in 1994, most of whom were killed in the war, now the subject of a film he is developing about the two surviving sons in Turkey and Germany.
See also
- Seamus Murphy — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host
- PJ Harvey — musician and collaborator on Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project