At Museo Camera, Gurugram, you come across an image of a lean boy, sporting chappals, captured in the act of having kicked a ball. The ball is nowhere to be seen, but his stance seems to be a clear giveaway. The photograph captures a moment of transformation—the look of concentration on the boy’s face turning into a smile of joy. The image contains other markers that allude to its backdrop—the louvered wooden windows typical to Kolkata’s neighbourhoods, and the signature yellow taxi lying abandoned with the paint nearly peeled off. Even as you see relics of the city’s past lying stripped of their aura, this photograph, taken in 2023 by Seamus Murphy, carries a whiff of positivity. This spirit of optimism runs like a thread through the Irish photographer’s work, currently on display as part of the show Life is in Many Days.
Another image from Gazastan in Afghanistan’s Takhar province shows a coal miner breaking into a hearty laugh as he takes a break from work. The genial humour of the man livens up this visual of a Spartan landscape, littered with white gunny bags and seemingly fraught with hardships. Curated by London-based Zelda Cheatle, the show features four major bodies of work—The Republic, a contemporary portrait of Murphy’s homeland of Ireland, which he revisits after having left at the age of 20; recent photos of everyday encounters of people in Kolkata’s streets, rituals and architecture, a city where he resides for part of every year with his wife; Strange Love, a series exploring unexpected parallels between Russia and the US through the lives of ordinary people; and a long-term body of work developed in Afghanistan through repeated visits since 1994.
Murphy’s work as a documentary photographer has taken him through some difficult, conflict-ridden areas but his images don’t directly allude to the rough terrain or the misery that persistent discord, social oppression or economic hardships might have caused. Rather, he evokes the humanity of the inhabitants by capturing the brief interlude between daily challenges that they fill with humour, empathy and resistance. The hardship becomes even more apparent to the viewer in the face of such resilience.
Chronicling humanity
He calls his style one marked by poetic realism. This is evident in the November 2002 image of a woman in the National Gallery of Kabul, in which she covers her face with a scrap of a magazine confiscated by the Taliban. Or in a September 2021 photo of a woman jumping into the waters at Sandycove in Dublin. This visual of utter liberation tells the history of the Forty Foot swimming place, made famous by James Joyce’s Ulysses, which had been a male domain until 20 July 1974, when a group of determined women invaded the bathing place, after discovering there was no legal cause for their exclusion.
Murphy, who is now based in London, has won several World Press Photo awards for his work in Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Peru, the UK and Ireland. He is extremely aware of the fact that some of these places and its residents come with the baggage of perceptions and stereotypes created by pop and visual culture. “I want to take a photograph in which they recognise themselves but also find something that is surprising. I show the images and ask for feedback: ‘Is this interesting to you?’, ‘Does it represent an aspect of your life?’,” he says.
The visual needs to communicate that story to viewers based elsewhere in the world, without force feeding a narrative. The series Strange Love challenges the conventional narrative of “East versus West” by offering similarities between the people of post-industrial Russia and the US. He believes that the work disorients the viewer, forcing them to question old assumptions and rethink geopolitical divides. “In doing so, a fundamental question is raised: Are the subjects’ lives really all that different? Can we... even distinguish between them in a set of photographs? And how often do we get it wrong?” he writes in the series’ note.
Murphy believes in going back to places that he once photographed in a bid to understand the different chapters in a site’s contemporary history. For instance, he has been in continuous contact with the Ba Deli family in Kabul, chronicling their lives since 1994. The photographer is currently developing a documentary feature film on the family that in 1994 lived in the Shor Bazaar district beside Stonecutter Street in Kabul’s old city. “They had been one of the few remaining families in this frontline neighbourhood—most had fled the fighting and bombing,” he writes in a note accompanying the photo. This consistent interaction has helped him understand the fabric of the people that he photographs. “The people in Afghanistan are very spiritual, they love poetry. Even through the worst of conflicts they tell jokes. They have a dark sense of humour,” says Murphy.
In places like Syria or Gaza, the relationship of people with the camera is complicated. It is not often their choice to become a part of a period’s visual culture or be perceived through an outsider’s viewfinder. How do documentary imagemakers then recognise and respect the agency of the people they set out to photograph? Murphy cites observations from his trips to Syria, 2007 onwards. “Each time that I went to Syria, people told me that they wanted the world to know what was going on in the country. They wanted their stories told,” he says. As a documentarian, Murphy doesn’t choose the narratives—he doesn’t decide which story merits to be told over the other. His agency lies elsewhere in deciding the kind of camera, angle and lens to choose. “All I am trying to do is to capture what is really happening and put it out there. That’s why I don’t like to interrupt people as they go about their daily lives. Images emerge from those everyday moments, and I just happen to be delivering those visual messages,” he says.
Till 25 October at Museo Camera, Gurugram, Tuesday to Saturday, 11am-7pm.