For more than three decades, Irish photographer Seamus Murphy has travelled through some of the world’s most politically charged places, from Afghanistan and Ireland to India, Russia, and America. Yet his photographs are less interested in spectacle than in the people living through it. This human-centred approach is at the heart of Life is in Many Days, his major exhibition at Museo Camera, curated by Zelda Cheatle, one of the world’s leading photographic curators. “People are at front and centre. They are certainly more interesting to me than the guns and hardware of war.”
That impulse defines his photographs of Afghanistan, where he has travelled repeatedly since 1994. Murphy deliberately resisted the “editorial clichés of war and suffering”, while seeking to show another side of a country shaped by conflict without denying its reality. The same instinct informs his photographs of Kolkata, where he looks beyond its exotic decline to gesture, humour, and ordinary life. “I try to be original,” he says, hoping “to reveal something that is in plain sight but was never seen like that before.” He finds a curious kinship between Kolkata and Kabul—their “energy, enterprise, human moments, dilapidation and shabbiness”.
Humour runs through his work in India, Ireland, America, and Russia. “Life is absurd, you can’t take it seriously all the time,” he says. In his portrait of Ireland, memory meets a changing country. “The Ireland I remember is still there amidst all the change. Even though the world is becoming a monopoly of multinational corporate interests, Ireland or India or anywhere else will always retain whatever it is that distinguishes it from elsewhere, and that is mostly through the behaviour of the people,” he says, adding of the country’s social transformation: “Some change is for the good!”
In an age when photographers are increasingly judged by likes and algorithms, Murphy remains focused on the image itself. His answer to the question of the photograph he is still waiting to make is characteristically simple: “The next one I am happy with.” And is he still surprised by what the camera reveals? “Yes. Life is full of surprises and so photography will be too.”