It takes Seamus Murphy a long moment to answer when I ask him to pick a single photograph from his new show. One image, out of four decades of work, that a first-time visitor should stand in front of. “It’s very hard,” he says, slightly perplexed. “I don’t think you can sum it up in one image, I’m afraid.” Then he lands on one anyway: a family in Kabul, photographed in their home in 1994, that he has returned to, again and again, for 30 years.
In 1994, on a dangerous front line, he stayed with the Ba Deli family — a father and four sons. He photographed them, and has been photographing them periodically, whenever he can travel to Afghanistan, to meet them. To him, their ordinary yet extraordinary lives, lived under invasion after occupation, filled with death, birth and marriage, is as much “a barometer of how the country has suffered, evolved and is suffering again now” as the triptych of photographs of Jade Maiwand, a thoroughfare in Kabul built in 1948, that he has photographed repeatedly, from the same vantage point, over his 20 visits to the country.
Kabul, Afghanistan (November 1994)
| Photo Credit:
Seamus Murphy
These photographs hold the sort of intimacy and poetic realism that the London-based Irish photographer and filmmaker has been seeking across his career. And they surface repeatedly at his new exhibition, Life is in Many Days, at the Museo Camera in Gurugram. A career-spanning show that sheds light on his stellar journey with documentary photography, it gathers work from Afghanistan, Ireland, Kolkata, Russia and the U.S.
Photographer-filmmaker Seamus Murphy
| Photo Credit:
Justin McKay
The show, curated by author-editor Zelda Cheatle, borrows its name from James Joyce’s Ulysses — a book Murphy calls “an amazing, amazing piece of work” that “people spend lifetimes trying to understand”. The line itself, he explains, is about how a person moves through a life meeting all kinds of people and, in the end, meets only themselves. “I think it sort of speaks to the humanism that I try to achieve with my photography,” he says. “And I just like its poetry. Life and days are, you know… they’re good words.”
Books, and kids on ponies
Murphy, 66, did not set out to be a photographer. In school in Dublin, he was, by his own account, unremarkable, except in writing essays and sports. So he thought he could be a journalist. It was only after he left Ireland for San Francisco in his early 20s that photography took hold. “There was a public darkroom down the street from where I was living, and I taught myself how to print,” he says. “That’s sort of what I’ve come back to doing, which is going out with my camera and photographing life around me.”
Decades later, during the pandemic, he went looking through that early San Francisco archive and found pictures he barely remembered taking. “I could have taken those pictures today, and I would have been happy with them,” he says. “Maybe technically they would have been better, because I was learning to process and get the right exposure. But beyond that, my eye has been the same.” He pauses. “On the one hand, that was kind of interesting. On the other hand, it was a bit depressing that I hadn’t improved that much,” he laughs.
Rusheens. Co. Roscommon (August 2015)
| Photo Credit:
Seamus Murphy
Irkutsk Oblast, Russia (September 2008)
| Photo Credit:
Seamus Murphy
Murphy is entirely self-taught, and says so plainly. “There were a lot of yard sales and great secondhand bookshops in San Francisco, and I would buy the ones I liked.” The list was full of classics, and yet “eclectic”: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Josef Koudelka, Helen Levitt, Jacques Henri Lartigue. “It’s extraordinary when you look at the [photography] work that was done before 1960,” he says. “You’ve got to remember the kind of cameras they were using, the film stock — not great light sensitivity — and yet they were able to achieve what they did. Maybe in some ways it was why they achieved what they did, because the challenge was there.”
His first real break came almost by accident, in Dublin a few years later, sitting in his father’s car (he was a doctor) during a house call. “Two kids, about 12 and 13 years of age, walked past on horseback, no saddles,” he remembers. The boys told him they kept the horses in their back gardens, in place of a dog or a cat, and rode them to a revived medieval horse market. Murphy photographed it. The Independent in London ran the pictures across a full black-and-white page and a Swedish newspaper’s local correspondent saw it and hired him. “It was all thanks to those kids on ponies,” he says, still amazed by the way that fate turns.
Killinick, Wexford (March 2011)
| Photo Credit:
Seamus Murphy
Photographs that seek humour
Ever since, Murphy has travelled across continents looking for and capturing life. Whether he’s shooting in conflict zones or domestic settings, his photographs seek humour and convey a sort of irrepressible kinetic energy: be it on the cliffs of the Forty Foot swimming place in Sandycove, Dublin, a place made famous by James Joyce’s Ulysses, but that was inaccessible to women till about 1974 when a group of women invaded the place to find there was no legal cause to keep them out; or the streets of South Beach, Florida, where a woman faces off with a bull terrier, baring her teeth at it; or Dover Lane, Kolkata, where he captures a boy playing football on the street.
Sandycove, Dublin (September 2021)
| Photo Credit:
Seamus Murphy
South Beach, Florida (November 2007)
| Photo Credit:
Seamus Murphy
Dover Lane, Kolkata (December 2023)
| Photo Credit:
Seamus Murphy
Kolkata is a newer, gentler obsession. His wife Smita (sister of politician-author Shashi Tharoor) grew up there, and the couple now spend two to three months a year in the city. “As soon as I arrived, I loved it. I absolutely adore the city,” he says. But loving a place, for Murphy, is not the same as photographing it freely.
Ritchie Road, Kolkata (February 2023)
| Photo Credit:
Seamus Murphy
“It’s a very hard place to photograph, even though it’s been photographed to death,” he says. “I spend more time not taking pictures than taking them, quite honestly, because I don’t want to keep repeating what’s been documented, what’s been done so well before. I’m trying to find my way into Calcutta.”
Life is in Many Days is on at the Museo Camera till October 25.
