PJ Harvey

English singer, songwriter, and musician (b. 1969); one of the most acclaimed British artists of her generation, the only performer to have won the Mercury Prize twice — for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2001) and Let England Shake (2011).

Harvey’s later work turned outward to politics, history, and place: Let England Shake confronts England’s imperial and wartime legacy, and The Hope Six Demolition Project draws on travels through Kosovo, Washington, and Afghanistan. She works across forms — albums, poetry, and film — and has collaborated closely with the photographer and film-maker Seamus Murphy, whose documentary eye shaped the visual world around both records.

In the wiki

• Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures — Seamus Murphy recounts how Harvey found him through his 2008 Afghanistan exhibition and, learning he had begun shooting video, asked him to make music films; he made 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, on a pact to stop if it ever failed to work. Murphy read her Afghanistan writing as having ‘an artist’s eye’, and the two albums as having caught Brexit before it arrived — nationalism distilled in the lyric ‘God Damn Europeans’.

See also

• Seamus Murphy — photographer and film-maker, her collaborator, who discussed the work with Tyler Cowen