Notes — Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures

Notes on Seamus Murphy in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/seamus-murphy/), 3 September 2025.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? A working photographer’s account of what a lifetime of photographing distant places has taught him — about the places, and about photography itself. Murphy, an Irish photojournalist and film-maker, moves from Afghanistan (three decades of it) outward to Ireland after the Celtic Tiger, Kolkata as a beloved ‘dying’ city, the visual kinship of Russia and America, his music films with PJ Harvey, and the traits he would look for in someone wanting his life. The through-line named in the title is method: patterns recur across cultures, and the photographer’s job is to notice them without forcing them.

Q2 — How is it argued? By anecdote and craft observation rather than thesis, which is itself Murphy’s stated method: he refuses to go out with a theme in his head and lets themes ‘present themselves’ in the edit. He reasons from concrete particulars — the green-eyed girl’s fraction-of-a-second exposure, the Kolkata Art Deco houses being demolished, the unchanging American payphone — to general claims about how images mislead and how cultures rhyme. He is candid about the limits of his knowledge (‘I’m not a historian’), and repeatedly deflates Cowen’s grander framings toward the human and the observed.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? His craft claims — that a photograph freezes an unrepresentative instant, that news selects for drama, that themes are better found than imposed — are well-grounded first-hand testimony and internally consistent. His geopolitical readings (Afghanistan’s troubles as largely externally imposed; the West’s shared responsibility for corruption) are argued opinion, not evidence, and he flags his own non-expertise. [?] Two factual specifics rest on his memory alone here: that Kabul grew from ~400,000–500,000 at the Soviet invasion to ~4.5 million, and that the green-eyed girl was photographed at the Pakistan border rather than inside Afghanistan (the latter is corroborated elsewhere).

Q4 — What of it? A transferable discipline for anyone who documents or interprets: distrust the single dramatic frame, and let structure emerge from evidence rather than precede it. It also gives the wiki its first sustained treatment of photojournalism and the ethics of the image, and — via Afghanistan, Ireland, Russia, and India — a first-person, ground-level counterweight to the wiki’s more analytical geopolitics and development material.

Glossary

Photojournalism — reporting the news through photographs; Murphy’s trade, in which a single frame must both inform and, he warns, inevitably compresses a longer reality into an unrepresentative instant. [§ On photographing Afghanistan]

The green-eyed girl — the celebrated 1984 National Geographic cover portrait of an Afghan refugee; Murphy corrects the common belief that it was shot in Afghanistan (it was taken at the Pakistan border) and uses it to illustrate how a photograph captures only a fraction of a second. [§ On photographing Afghanistan]

Celtic Tiger — the period of rapid Irish economic growth (roughly mid-1990s to 2008) and its subsequent crash; Murphy treats it as a shallow, property-obsessed interlude from which Ireland emerged chastened. [§ On Ireland’s changes]

Diaspora — the population of a country living abroad; for Afghanistan, Murphy locates the realistic hope for change here, since people inside the country are ‘pretty impotent’ under the authorities but remittances keep families alive. [§ On Afghanistan]

The edit / sequencing — the photographer’s post-shoot practice of selecting and ordering images so that pairs and runs create mood and meaning; Murphy cut his America–Russia book from 136 pictures to 88, changing its meaning by doing so. [§ On similarities between Russia and America]

Strange Love — Murphy’s latest book, a visual comparison of America and Russia built on the conceit that the two ‘natural enemies’ resemble each other; exhibited in London, October–November 2025. [§ On similarities between Russia and America]

Key claims by section

On Afghanistan [opening; unlabelled in raw]

Optimism for Afghanistan rests on its people — easygoing, poetic, harmonious, deeply attached to their country — not on its politics; the country’s troubles are largely imposed from outside on a small nation caught between larger powers.
The realistic agent of change is the diaspora (remittances keep families alive) plus an eventual internal Taliban recalibration; younger Taliban and probably most Taliban oppose the bans on girls’ schooling, which Murphy traces to the Kandahar leadership and ‘one or two people’.
The West shares blame for Afghan corruption: it spent the money knowing (by 2010–2015) what was happening, then disowned the result. [?] Kabul is said to have grown from ~400,000–500,000 at the Soviet invasion to ~4.5 million now.
His biggest practical fear anywhere — Afghanistan, India, elsewhere — is a car crash, reckoned to kill more foreign correspondents than conflict does.

On photographing Afghanistan [opening; unlabelled in raw]

Afghans love being photographed and have a ‘built-in radar’ for a camera, making candid work hard; the craft is to talk to a subject until a natural moment arrives, so ‘candid’ images are often patiently arranged.
News selects the most dramatic of many frames, building a superficial picture that is true but unrepresentative.
The green-eyed girl was photographed at the Pakistan border, not in Afghanistan; a photograph is a fraction of a second — she ‘might have been smiling’ before and ‘crying’ after. [?]

On Ireland’s changes [§ On Ireland’s changes]

Russia recalled pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland: friendliness, warmth, daily struggle, shared laughter.
The Celtic Tiger was a shallow, property-and-debt-obsessed interlude; the crash taught a lesson Murphy hopes has stuck, and the loud far-right anti-immigrant faction is a genuinely small minority.
The South, never industrialised, is catching up — and educated itself after the 1980s recession into one of the most educated populations on Earth; Northern Ireland did not follow that path.
The collapse of Catholic Church authority (he likens 1960s Dublin to ‘Taliban, Ireland’) was a house of cards: quiet erosion until speaking out became permissible, then sudden collapse. The church has fallen; religion has not necessarily gone.

On Kolkata [§ On Kolkata]

Murphy lives mainly in London, part of the year in Kolkata (his Indian wife’s favourite city); he loves it for history, buildings, food, and a genuinely non-elite, widespread intellectual life (the book fair’s hundreds of ‘little magazines’).
Kolkata is ‘slightly a dying city’, deindustrialising and out of step with Modi’s ‘thrusting new India’ — which is its charm; its Art Deco houses, built by families fleeing East Bengal and the 1971 war, are being demolished for flats as scattered families cash out.
Digression on danger (under this section in the raw): Syria’s people were warm even in 2012 when he ‘shouldn’t have gone’; Nigeria held his two closest brushes with death within hours — dragged from a car by a Boko Haram mob, then outrunning a crowd to dive through a moving car window.

On similarities between Russia and America [§ On similarities between Russia and America]

Michigan resembles Russia visually; the deeper kinship is grandness of design and an industrial, built-to-last solidity (the unchanging American payphone).
Strange Love grew from a 2008 conceit that the two ‘natural enemies’ look and behave alike; Trump’s early ‘bromance’ with Putin revived it, sending Murphy back to the Urals (2017, 2019) as a counterpart to his Pittsburgh work.
Method: he shoots without a theme, because carrying one is ‘restricting’, and finds themes in the edit; the book fell from 136 to 88 pictures, a cut that changed and lightened its meaning.
Russians’ deadpan seriousness is itself the humour — dark, Irish-adjacent, the joke being that you can’t tell it’s a joke.

On working with PJ Harvey [§ On working with PJ Harvey]

PJ Harvey found Murphy via his 2008 Afghanistan exhibition/book; his images may have fed songs she had written about the First World War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and England.
Asked to make music films, he stayed in England (rather than filming Iraq/Afghanistan) to find a visual equivalent of its imperial and wartime legacy — twelve short films for Let England Shake.
The partnership deepened into The Hope Six Demolition Project, worked simultaneously across Kosovo, Washington, and Afghanistan; her Afghanistan writing struck him as a true ‘artist’s eye’.
He reads both albums as catching Brexit before it arrived — nationalism tapped by the lyric ‘God Damn Europeans’.

On spotting talent [§ On spotting talent]

The predictor of success is not technique (easily learned, native to the young) but curiosity and genuine love of the subject; you must love the work because long projects feel like failure for a long time.
Murphy learned photography in America, not Ireland — a camera, time, and a public dark room closed the loop between seeing and result; his breakthrough was a story on inner-city Dublin children keeping ponies, seen freshly on return from abroad.
His current long project: a film about a Kabul family first photographed in 1994, most killed in the war, with two sons surviving in Turkey and Germany — over thirty years of photographs.