OPENING
THURSDAY 16TH OCTOBER
6 – 9 PM

EXHIBITION
17TH OCTOBER – 2ND NOVEMBER
DAILY 1 – 6 PM

 

CLOSED
MONDAY

SEAMUS MURPHY is a documentary photographer and filmmaker. Regardless of medium or subject, he strives for intimacy and a poetic realism. As a photographer he has won 7 World Press Photo awards for his work in Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Peru, UK and Ireland.
He undertakes long-term documentary projects and has been published and exhibited widely.

He is in the collections of The Getty Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Gallery of Ireland, and FRAC, Auvergne, France.

Books

A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan (Saqi Books. 2008) Based on 12 trips to the country between 1994 and 2007, it is a chronicle of Afghanistan’s recent history. 

I Am The Beggar of the World (Farrar Straus Giroux. 2014) is a rare glimpse into the lives of Afghan women through their own anonymous Landay poetry.

He has collaborated with musician/poet PJ Harvey on projects Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project. Murphy and Harvey together published The Hollow of the Hand (Bloomsbury. 2015) a book of his photography and Harvey’s poetry. An exhibition and live presentation of The Hollow of the Hand took place at the Royal Festival Hall, London in 2015 and at Les Recontres d’Arles in France in 2016.

The Republic (Allen Lane. 2016) is a personal and immediate photographic journey around his native Ireland in advance of the centenary of its revolution.

Strange Love (Setanta Books, 2025) looks at the curious relationship between Russia and America, and questions the myth of opposites they have created.

Film

As a filmmaker, Murphy shot and directed his feature debut A Dog Called Money (2019) based on his collaboration with PJ Harvey. Discovering human history through the lives of people they meet in Kosovo, Afghanistan and the US, and a window into the creative process. It premiered at the Berlinale,  2019 before going on cinema release.

Murphy shot and directed his second feature documentary The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby (2022), about the life, work and imagination of maverick Irish poet, Pat Ingoldsby. It went on cinema release in 2022.

He won the Liberty in Media Prize, and was nominated for an Emmy for A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan, his film based around his photographic work in Afghanistan.

12 Short Films for PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, a cycle of 12 films, one for each track on her Mercury Prize-winning album. His music films for Harvey’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, won a Q Award for Best Music Film in October 2016.

In ARTFORUM Patti Smith listed Murphy’s music film for The Words that Maketh Murder as one of her Top 10 artworks, saying “… this unheralded piece is a wisp of humanity celebrating the small things.”

When two images are put together in sequence they produce a third meaning in the tension between the two. That, put very succinctly, was the idea of ‘montage’ as defined by the pioneers of Soviet cinema like Sergey Eisenstein. As he lived in an Empire driven by Communist ideology, Eisenstein then claimed that this clash of images to produce a third meaning was the artistic parallel of Marxist historical doctrine, where ‘dialectically’ contrasting ideologies collide over time to produce a third: feudalism clashing with bourgeois democracy to produce the proletarian heaven.

In his most propagandistic films Eisenstein would try to combine different shots to give both narrative and ideological meaning. The ideological-historical part of Eisenstein’s ideas seems highly suspect now- the efforts of a man desperately trying to match his talents to a tyrannical system that would eventually crush him. But his insight into how images combine to produce new meanings is as sharp as ever.

In his remarkable book ‘STRANGE LOVE’ Seamus Murphy continues in its spirit – his images of Russia and America are poignantly put next to each other. But unlike Eisenstein his aim is to use montage to undermine ideologies and propaganda, leaving the reader (and you do end up ‘reading’ this book) seeing the (often literally) naked humanity below, and the vast emptiness below that.

Many of the images in this book are worthy of separate essays on the relationship between power, people and propaganda. The photo of the American soldier at a snack vending machine next to dummies of mutilated soldiers used, one assumes, for some sort of target practice is the sort of image that can launch a thousand sociology theses. As could the one of the uniformed, Russian train official with the curtain muffling his face. But it’s when these pictures are put in sequence that they become even more powerful. Sometimes the contrast between Russia and America is (almost comfortingly) obvious. Often the echoes between them question difference.

But then there are the moments when you can’t tell where you are- are those the sad hills of the Amur region or Dakota? The depression of which rust belt? Are the garish hotel rugs, around which you could organise academic conferences about repressed desire, on the floors of provincial Russian hotels or Detroit? This is not an ‘easy’ place to find oneself in. Who are we without propaganda? If I can’t identify myself on this, or that, side, part of this, or that, story- then where am I?

Peter Pomeranstev