When the Irish documentary photographer and film-maker Seamus Murphy came back from Russia in 2008 he made a surprising discovery. He had travelled to the far east of the country to photograph the oil- and gas-rich regions that were both fuelling the Russian economy and propping up Vladimir Putin’s regime. What he didn’t at all expect was to be reminded of a similar solitary six-week trip to the US that he’d made the year before.
“As I went back through the files and contact sheets of my images I was struck not by the differences but by the similarities with America,” Murphy says. “It wasn’t just the way things such as the urban and postindustrial landscape looked the same as, say, in the Rust Belt cities of the United States. People’s lives in the two countries didn’t seem that hugely different.
“You go to the back end of nowhere in America and, like similar places in Russia, the level of things like healthcare, wages and education are pretty bad. Most people are struggling, and face the same personal challenges and family and social problems. If you’re living under the shadow of a great superpower, life can be the same: people are exploited; human behaviour is human behaviour.”
The realisation gave Murphy an idea. “The cold war was built on the ideology of these two global powers being so different and such enemies that conflict and killing was inevitable and had to be maintained,” he says. “But what if, on a human level, that was all a lie?”
He eventually returned to Russia in 2017 and 2019 – this time to photograph locations in Moscow and in the military and nationalistic heartlands of the Urals – with that thought specifically in mind. “I’d covered the rise of Trump in America, been to his rallies, seen the way he seemed to revere Putin and his power, the disconcerting bromance of it all,” he says. “And I realised, s**t, I’ve really got to follow through with this.”
Since then, of course, and particularly during the current authoritarian Trump presidency, the idea has only become increasingly more timely and geopolitically germane.
The result is Strange Love, the culmination of an almost 20-year project and the latest work from the award-winning 65-year-old. An ingenious title that reflects the “weird love-hate enabling and interdependence” between the US and Russia, as well as a nod to the 1964 film Dr Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s devastating parody of cold-war fears of nuclear annihilation, Strange Love’s 88 colour images are sequenced so that each is on a double-page spread, the photographs alternating between the two countries.
None is captioned, although there are thumbnail images at the back of the book that identify a photograph’s location, if not subject and date. The desired effect is at once disorientating and intriguing; as a viewer you constantly recalibrate your preconceptions of place, time and context, not quite sure where you are. Even the cover image of a five-pointed star is suitably ambiguous: is it a Soviet communist red star or a rusting symbol of the Lone Star State of Texas?
“Sometimes it’s obvious which country you’re in: there’s an American flag; or a sign in Cyrillic; or a black person, which makes it more likely to be the US,” he says. “But I’m hoping that, while each picture is a story in itself, the book is also an accumulation and a journey, that as you go through you get lost in the narrative, in the pictures and in the moments.”
Murphy is talking from Nablus, in the West Bank, where he is again revisiting locations in a complex and fractured state – this time in the city in which in 2004 he both took stills for the Oscar-nominated Palestinian feature film Paradise Now and chronicled daily life during the second intifada. A desire to record, re-examine and return to the world’s major conflict zones is characteristic of his acclaimed career. He often takes the long view.
An unusually versatile and widescreen photographer whose work embraces portraiture, reportage, conflict, war, landscape, urban, street and social-issue images, both in colour and black and white, and in still and moving images, Murphy has received seven World Press Photo awards for his work in Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Peru, Britain and Ireland. He has published four books, including In the Republic, a personal odyssey before the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising.
Murphy has also collaborated with PJ Harvey on the albums Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project, leading to music films, multimedia exhibitions and the book The Hollow of the Hand. He has made short films for Channel 4, the New Yorker and Unicef, and received an Emmy nomination for A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan, a film based on his photographic work from 14 trips to the country. His most recent feature documentary is The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby, an exploration of “the life, work and imagination of the maverick Irish poet”, who died earlier this year.
“Regardless of medium or subject, I’m always striving for intimacy and a certain poetic realism,” he says. “I’m not trying to sentimentalise or beautify what I’m seeing. I am trying to record the moment in a hopefully truthful, dignified and creative way. The reason I love novels is that you get to experience another person’s reality. Photography is the same. The search is about showing and sharing a glimpse of what life and humanity are all about.”
Murphy was born in Orsett, in Essex, southeast England. His father, also called Seamus, was brought up in Claremorris, Co Mayo, and studied medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in Dublin before leaving in the late 1940s to work in the newly founded NHS. His mother, Francesca Fitzgerald – “a great character, very refined, very creative” – was raised in England by Irish parents.
Seamus was the youngest of six children, four girls and two boys, who were all born in England. When he was six months old the family moved to Ireland, eventually settling in Glasnevin Avenue in north Dublin. His father ran a large GP surgery in nearby Finglas; he also owned and trained racehorses.
When Murphy was 14 three Ulster Volunteer Force car bombs exploded in Dublin; together with a fourth bomb, in Monaghan, the attack killed 33 civilians and injured almost 300. “I would come home on the bus from my school, Terenure College, and was in the centre of town around the time everything was happening. I think it introduced me to the idea of such things as news, current affairs, history, politics, violence and danger. I’d sort of discovered what I wanted to do with my life.”
Settling on becoming a journalist, he won a place at Trinity College Dublin to study English but left soon afterwards to enrol on a more practical three-year communications course at Rathmines College. Coming of age “in Taliban Ireland – the Irish Catholic chapter”, however – during the hard times and high unemployment of the late 1970s and early 1980s – Murphy was bored and restless and couldn’t wait to see more of the world.
In 1983 he travelled to the US and ended up staying for almost four years; most of the time he lived in San Francisco and worked as a house painter. He’d also bought a camera and “really took to it” after he discovered a public darkroom at the end of his street. Murphy is entirely self-taught; he learned through trial, error, experimentation and practice. He also picked up a wide range of photography books at yard sales. “I learned by looking at different photographers’ choices,” he says.
Murphy moved to London in 1987 and has lived there ever since. His big break came in his late 20s when he was back in Dublin at Christmas and photographed kids riding horses in the inner city. “I was used to seeing them from my childhood, but I’d been in America and I thought, ‘Actually, this is not usual.’” He sold the story to the London Independent; it was later picked up by a Swedish newspaper. He had a nose for a story and was on his way.
As well as “a plea for humanism”, Murphy’s work since then has been marked by several further themes. He prefers to work serendipitously, to follow his instincts and react to the moment in real time. “Well, I’m not exactly the Charlie Parker of the f-stop,” he says, laughing, when I suggest his modus operandi sounds something like that of a jazz musician. “But, yes, I’m always trying to capture the moment, to share something fresh and surprising.”
There is often an element of humour in his photographs, or at least some sense of the surreal or absurd. Murphy is also searching for the hidden and oblique; his work has been described as suggestive, elliptical and impressionistic – he is often looking for a measure of mystery, to raise questions beyond the frame. I have worked on assignment with Murphy, and he is a quietly assured presence, a photographer with equal parts guile, intelligence and charm. Most of all, he is democratic and non-judgemental.
He no doubt needed to exhibit both qualities on his extended trips to Russia and the United States. “I’m definitely not trying to make any equivalence politically, and I’m certainly not pointing fingers or preaching or claiming any objectivity,” he says. “But I suppose Strange Love did distil my work in some way and supply it with … not a manifesto but an idea at the heart of it all. And it couldn’t be simpler, really, or more important: we aren’t as different to each other as they say we are.”
Strange Love is published by Setanta Books
