Seamus Murphy grew up in Ireland and is based in London. He is heralded for his extensive international work from Afghanistan, the Middle East, the United States and Russia. He has been widely exhibited and published, with work in the collections of the Imperial War Museum and The Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He is the author of four photography books.
The idea of photographing Ireland started during a trip into Syria with FSA rebels in 2012 – trekking silently for eight hours through regime-held villages under a blanket of darkness left time for reflection. It reminded him of meeting veterans from Ireland’s War of Independence (1919-1921) and Civil War (1922-1923). He had photographed the surviving handful in the late 1990s; the youngest was ninety-seven and the oldest one hundred and five. He equated their experiences with the ones he would later encounter in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Thirty years after leaving Ireland, travelling widely and listening to stories from other countries, he asked himself, what about my own country?
‘A picture I took in 2011 in County Wexford wouldn’t leave me alone. A man rides a horse seated backwards over a steep, tricky hedge. An elegant joke if he manages to stay on, which he does. A glimpse of the comedy we make of life, death and the rules in Ireland. I had a starting point.’
In 2016, one hundred years after Ireland’s 1916 Rising, came The Republic, where Murphy turned an affectionate and incisive eye on his own country.
Inevitably it was going to be a personal and poetic body of work. On his first trip back through Ireland for the book, he recalled the names of places ‘glimpsed from the back seat of the car on family trips to my father’s home county of Mayo’. He mentions in the book’s essay how growing up in Ireland in the 1970s ‘felt like a sideshow, with priests acting as shabby park-wardens, or more seriously, as police’. As a young man he couldn’t wait to leave.
Now after decades as an exile, an escapee and an outsider, Murphy chose to examine what often goes unnoticed or unrecorded, what moved or surprised him.
The gallery will exhibit 21 colour images from the series, all works are for sale.
Leica Gallery London
64-66 Duke Street Mayfair
London
W1K 6JD
Vereinigtes Königreich
Sunday: 12pm - 6pm