Speaker

Seamus Murphy

Seamus Murphy

Irish photographer and film-maker, born in 1959 and raised in Dublin, now based in London. A seven-time World Press Photo award winner, he has photographed across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America for over two decades, with a body of Afghanistan work stretching back to 1994.

Murphy learned photography not in Ireland but after emigrating to America in the 1980s, where a bought camera and a public dark room let him close the loop between taking a picture and controlling its result. His books include A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan, The Republic (a portrait of Ireland), and Strange Love, a visual comparison of America and Russia built on the conceit that the two supposed enemies resemble each other. He is also a film-maker, and collaborated with the musician PJ Harvey on twelve short music films for Let England Shake and, subsequently, on The Hope Six Demolition Project and the book The Hollow of the Hand, pairing his photographs with her poetry. He divides his life between London and Kolkata, his Indian wife’s favourite Indian city.

Core positions

  • A photograph is a fraction of a second, not a verdict. The single dramatic frame that reaches the news is true but unrepresentative; the subject ‘might have been smiling’ before and ‘crying’ after. Documentary images inevitably compress a longer, more ambiguous reality.
  • Let themes emerge from the images, not precede them. Going out with a theme in his head would be ‘restricting’; he shoots people and relationships without a thesis and finds the structure in the edit — cutting his America–Russia book from 136 to 88 pictures to change its meaning.
  • A country’s troubles are often imported. For Afghanistan he blames outside powers and self-serving actors more than the people, whom he finds easygoing and harmonious; realistic hope lies with the diaspora and internal reform, not external intervention.
  • Distant cultures rhyme. Russia and America share a grandness of design and an industrial, built-to-last solidity; Russia recalled pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland in its warmth and dark humour. The patterns recur across borders drawn as enmities.
  • Curiosity beats technique. In an aspiring photographer he looks not for technical skill — easily learned, native to the young — but for genuine interest and love of the subject, because long projects feel like failure for a long time before they resolve.

In the wiki