Writer and musician Harvey and award-winning photographer Seamus Murphy, hatched a collaboration. Seeking first-hand experience of the countries she wanted to write about, Harvey accompanied Murphy on some of his worldwide reporting trips, joining him in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Washington, D.C. Harvey collected words, and Murphy collected images.
Back home, the words become poems, songs, then an album, which is recorded in an unprecedented art experiment in Somerset House, London. In a specially constructed room behind one-way glass, the public — all cameras surrendered — are invited to watch the five-week process as a live sound-sculpture. Murphy exclusively documents the experiment with the same forensic vision and private access as their travels.
By capturing the immediacy of their encounters with the people and places they visited, Murphy shows the humanity at the heart of the work, tracing the sources of the songs, their special metamorphosis into recorded music, and, ultimately, cinema.
Europe’s migration crisis isn’t over — it’s just beginning. With net immigration expected to exceed 1 million per year for the next five decades and xenophobia surging, European leaders are grasping for new ways to slow the influx. So far, their efforts have included tighter rules and enforcement at home, as well as multibillion-dollar development projects and support for local militaries and governments in Africa.
This investigation was first published in Foreign Policy and received the 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in the New Media category.
Education
The Open Call for the VII Masterclass in Warsaw will be accepting applications now through June 14, 2018. The VII Masterclass is the most ambitious and exhaustive training program available. Aimed at developing and consolidating new talent in documentary photography and photojournalism over the course of seven months, it is only offered every other year and takes place in three sessions of four days each.
Seamus Murphy is the recipient of seven World Press Photo awards for work in Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Peru, and Ireland.
He has been exhibited widely and is in the collections of The Getty Museum Los Angeles, Imperial War Museum, Stanford University, FRAC Auvergne, the Incite Project.
He has made films for The New Yorker, Channel 4 Television in the UK, and for musician PJ Harvey.
He is the author of four books: A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan (Saqi Books. 2008) based on 12 trips to the country between 1994 and 2007. I Am The Beggar of the World (Farrar Straus Giroux. 2014) offers a rare glimpse into the lives of Afghan women through anonymous Landay poetry.
Murphy and PJ Harvey collaborated on the book The Hollow of the Hand (Bloomsbury 2015). An exhibition and presentation followed at the Royal Festival Hall, London in 2015 and at Les Recontres d’Arles in France in 2016.
His latest book, The Republic (Allen Lane. 2016), is a personal portrait of Ireland, exhibited in Dublin in 2017.
In February 2018 at Hotel Fontfreyde in Clermont-Ferrand, France, Murphy exhibited Life is in Many Days, a review of 30 years of his work.
