Seamus Murphy is an Irish photographer and filmmaker who has spent decades documenting life in some of the world’s most challenging places—from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to Nigeria’s Boko Haram territories. Having left recession-era Ireland in the 1980s to teach himself photography in American darkrooms, Murphy has become that rare artist who moves seamlessly between conflict zones and recording studios, creating books of Afghan women’s poetry while directing music videos that anticipated Brexit.
Tyler and Seamus discuss the optimistic case for Afghanistan, his biggest fear when visiting any conflict zone, how photography has shaped perceptions of Afghanistan, why Russia reminded him of pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, how the Catholic Church’s influence collapsed so suddenly in Ireland, why he left Ireland in the 1980s, what shapes Americans impression of Ireland, living part-time in Kolkata and what the future holds for that “slightly dying” but culturally vibrant city, his near-death encounters with Boko Haram in Nigeria, the visual similarities between Michigan and Russia, working with PJ Harvey on Let England Shake and their travels to Kosovo and Afghanistan together, his upcoming film about an Afghan family he’s documented for thirty years, and more.
Watch the full conversation
Recorded August 21st, 2025.
Read the full transcript
TYLER COWEN: Hello everyone. Welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I am talking with Seamus Murphy, who is an Irish photographer and filmmaker. He has numerous books, including photography of Afghanistan, Russia, America, and Ireland.
He has a book of poetry from Afghanistan. He has worked with PJ Harvey, the British popular music star, on two albums, including on Let England Shake. He does film as well. He’s a hard person to summarize because there is, in fact, no one else like him. He grew up in the Dublin area. Seamus, welcome.
SEAMUS MURPHY: Thank you. Lovely to be here.
COWEN: Just to start with Afghanistan, where you’ve spent a lot of time recently, correct?
MURPHY: Yes.
COWEN: Is there an optimistic case for that country right now? If so, what does it look like?
MURPHY: I think the optimism that I would have for that country would be the people. I’ve got a lot of faith in the people. We have this impression of Afghanistan as being very conservative, very extreme. It’s not at all. They’re very easygoing people. They’ve been in the middle of a lot of trouble, usually caused by people on the outside.
They’re a small country. They’re strategically between many powers. They’ve had a lot of problems in their time. I think the optimism I would be looking towards would be the diaspora, I suppose, the people that have left, the people that might be able to do something from outside. They’re certainly keeping people alive by sending money back.
I would say also people’s love, their love of their country is something special. It’s not a silly patriotism. It’s really, really deep in their veins. It’s one thing to have problems in your country and all the rest of it, but to actually have to leave your country — that’s tough for anyone. I think for Afghans, it’s particularly tough because they have such a love for their country. I would say the diaspora is probably the . . . Because people in Afghanistan can’t do much. They have to go along with whatever the authorities are saying. They’re pretty impotent.
COWEN: Is there enough ethnic unity there to build a nation state? Or you think the path of progress looks quite different altogether?
MURPHY: I think they do get on with each other. There are tribal differences. Like anywhere, I think people want to get on with each other. I think it’ll be some upstart politician, someone who sees a way to make a profit for themselves or make a name for themselves — they’ll stir up trouble.
Vested interest in other countries will promote one leader over another. That’s where the problem lies. I don’t think it’s the Afghans themselves. They’re like you and me. They’re actually better at times than you and me. They really are harmonious people. Very poetic. Very able to have a laugh. I’ve seen people make jokes in the worst of circumstances. I think the thing about Afghanistan is, if they were left to their own devices, they would be fine. But unfortunately, they never have that luxury.
COWEN: In the 1960s and part of the ’70s, it seemed Afghanistan was ready to grow, become a mature nation. What went wrong after that point, in your take?
MURPHY: I don’t know — ’79 was the Islamic Revolution; ’79 was the invasion by the Soviets. There were things stirring in the region. I suppose, extremists were maybe heeding the call from Saudi Arabia. I don’t know. I’m not a historian. It seems too coincidental that these two things happened very close to each other. There were things going on.
You’re right. You look at photographs of the ’50s, the ’60s — people dressed like people in the West. You look at pictures now, and it’s like going back 100 years, 200 years. But it’s happened around the world, hasn’t it? Religious extremism is not peculiar to Afghanistan. I think Afghanistan’s had a very bad taste of it because they are in a strategic position where they can be exploited.
COWEN: How urbanized is Afghanistan now? Kabul’s a pretty big city?
MURPHY: Kabul’s a very big city. I think when the Soviets invaded, it was something like 400,000 or 500,000 people. We’re now looking at 4.5 million, something like that. The infrastructure doesn’t keep up with it. When NATO was in for 20 years, there was road building. There were projects that should have modernized the country. But there’s also a lot of corruption. Corruption set in fairly early on.
You could say that was the Afghans’ fault, but I think, actually, the people that were giving the money, the West, should have been more vigilant. I think they knew what was going on. If they really wanted to solve the problem of corruption, they could have done more. They must have known in 2010, 2015, how things were going. Everyone knew there was corruption everywhere, and they continued to spend the money.
Then when the time came, they said, “Well, we’ve spent all this money. Nothing to show for it. We’re getting out.” But they’re the ones who spent the money, so surely, there’s some responsibility there.
COWEN: How enduring do you think Taliban rule will be?
MURPHY: I don’t know. I can’t see anybody other than the Afghans going in and doing something, unless we had another 9/11. The only reason, in a way, the Taliban were kicked out in 2001 was because of 9/11. No one was caring, no one was looking at Afghanistan. They were very interested when the Soviets moved in, the Cold War continued in Afghanistan.
There were vested interests. The Americans poured billions of dollars of arms into the country, and by indirect means, created the Taliban. Now, the idea of a Western force going in there and trying to sort something out — I can’t see it happening politically, no.
COWEN: Do you think the more optimistic scenario is the Taliban reforms from within or the Taliban is somehow overthrown?
MURPHY: I think reform from within. I was there last in December, and what I found was, there’s definitely the younger Taliban — and probably most of the Taliban — do not want the draconian rules that are being brought in, banning children, girls going to school. They want their sisters and their daughters to go to school. It’s widespread, and it’s not just in the cities. I came across this in the country as well.
I think it’s the leadership in Kandahar and one or two people, really. I think that’s maybe not going to last forever. Hopefully, there will be some internal recalibration, and the Taliban open themselves up to more outside influence and things normalize. That would be a good scenario. I was thinking that when I was there, that actually is… it’s a very strong possibility. Eventually, that’ll happen, because I think also the country needs it. The country needs it economically.
COWEN: Do you have a sense of what the current birth rate is in Afghanistan?
MURPHY: No.
COWEN: Families are still having at least two children, so the population’s growing?
MURPHY: Life goes on. Any place like Afghanistan where I’ve been, you arrive having read reports, and you get there, and you think, “Oh my God, life must be so affected by this.” Of course, it is, but life goes on. It’s quite extraordinary that they’re not going to stop having children. They love their —
COWEN: But in a lot of countries, the fertility rate has plummeted just because women have decided they don’t want two or three kids. Even in Iran, it’s quite low. This has not yet come to Afghanistan.
MURPHY: I don’t know if that rationale is promoted in Afghanistan by the Taliban.
COWEN: How safe is it to go there now? When you go, how safe do you feel?
MURPHY: In some ways safer than ever before, but I’m a man, and I’m a Westerner, and I don’t have any particular history of shouting about the Taliban or fighting the Taliban, so for me, it’s easy enough. Law and order is very strong. If people rob things, they might get their hands chopped off. That has an effect.
As an outsider, as a Westerner, it’s safe in as much as a place like that can be safe. There’s always the possibility of kidnapping, and there are other more extreme elements than the Taliban. Afghan ISIS and those people would be very dangerous. But to go to Kabul, it’s very safe, I think.
COWEN: Would I be less safe as an American? You have an Irish passport, right?
MURPHY: Yes. No, I don’t think so. Like in Iran, on the one hand they’re saying death to America, but the other side of the mouth, they’re saying, “My brother lives in Michigan.” America is saint and sinner for everyone.
COWEN: What’s the biggest practical hardship with being there?
MURPHY: For an outsider?
COWEN: Boiling the water might be difficult, or the electricity goes out, or there’s a risk of dengue. What’s the actual biggest problem, maybe other than being kidnapped?
MURPHY: My biggest fear always is a car crash because I think they reckon that more foreign correspondents get killed in car crashes than in any conflict zone. I’m always terrified. Also, if you’re hiring a driver, they’re always trying to prove that they’re faster and they’ll get you somewhere in a hurry. I always tell them, “Please, please, just calm down.” That would be my biggest fear, and it’s always my biggest fear, whether it’s India or Afghanistan or any other place.
COWEN: Is there enough congestion in the capital that you’re not going to die on the road there, or it’s still an issue?
MURPHY: Yes. I love traffic jams. I love when we’ve come from the Shomali Plain in the north, racing down the highway, three at a time overtaking, and then eventually you get to these outskirts of Kabul, Khair Khana, and I breathe a sigh of relief as we slow down, and it takes an hour to get the rest of the way, which is not very far. It’s terrifying. It’s very, very slow. Very slow.
COWEN: Now, I found when I try to photograph rural Mexicans, they put on their most serious face, the entire body stiffens, and it looks quite unnatural. But to them, that’s what a photograph is, and I’m fine with that. How is it in Afghanistan?
MURPHY: Afghanistan is particularly difficult because they have some built-in radar when they know there’s somebody with a camera. They just know it. As soon as they detect it, they start shouting at everyone, “There’s a guy with a camera, there’s a guy with a camera.” So, it’s very difficult to turn up somewhere and do something candid, or even just to relax the atmosphere. It’s a carnival thing.
I think you have to work around that. They love having their photograph taken. You play with that, and you try and catch them as naturally as possible. A lot of the time, you think pictures are candid, and actually, you’ve been talking to the person, and there’s a moment, and you get it. That’s good. The biggest difficulty in Afghanistan is that people love to be photographed. That can be a little bit tedious.
COWEN: No religious strictures that are a problem?
MURPHY: Not anymore. No. That was back in ’97. I was there in ’96 when the Taliban took over the first time. That was when they were stringing up television sets and undoing videotape. They say that it’s idolatry to, in any way lionize the human face. That’s why, when you go to a mosque, you never see any faces. You do come across it sometimes. Somebody will give you some chapter and verse that in the Quran, it says this about photography. You’re, “When was the Quran written? And when was photography invented?”
COWEN: If you think about the outside world, do you have a sense of how photography has shaped how people perceive Afghanistan now? Some iconic image? What’s the effect, and how realistic is it?
MURPHY: I think, like anything really, whether it’s news or whether it’s photography, you do things that, in some ways, will capture people’s attention. You’re trying to communicate something. Rather than having 10 pictures of something boring, the 11th picture — someone doing something interesting — will be the one that you like, that you strive for. The most dramatic, the most intense will be the images that make it onto the news or in the newspapers. That’s just fact.
If you’re interested in the subject, and you start looking at the diversity of books out there and the collections of photographs from Afghanistan, there’s a lot there of human life, daily life. It’s not all doom and gloom. I think it’s also understanding the news business, that it is this thing of headlines, and it is news, so people want to see something new, something novel. There’s a superficiality to that, for sure.
COWEN: The famous photo of the young woman with green eyes — that’s from Afghanistan, right?
MURPHY: Actually, it’s from Pakistan. It’s from the border. I think that family had fled the Soviet invasion, and they were in the border. I think it was in the tribal areas, probably Peshawar.
COWEN: Is that misleading in some way?
MURPHY: Misleading? No, I don’t think so. In the picture, she’s looking pretty terrified. The thing, of course, you’ve got to remember about photography — that photograph was probably taken in a fraction of a second. Two minutes before that, she might have been smiling, and two minutes later, she might have been crying. It’s a process. The person takes the photograph, the photograph gets disseminated. It was used, I think on the cover of National Geographic. They had a much wider story on what was going on in Afghanistan. If you read the story, you’d be filled in on what was going on.
It was a very striking moment of the kind of fear, I think, that you could imagine a girl like that having. Whether she was afraid at the time, I don’t know. Maybe she was frightened of the camera. Maybe she was frightened of this white guy taking a photograph. I just don’t know. I think it also captured the beauty of that girl. That’s another thing about Afghanistan, people are absolutely beautiful. They’re very striking, and I think that’s important to see that side of it.
COWEN: Now, in one of your books on Afghanistan called I Am the Beggar of This World, you mentioned that Pashtun women are not supposed to show love and romance, even when they’re getting married. Why is that?
MURPHY: I didn’t write that. That would’ve been Eliza Griswold, a friend and journalist. We did this project together. Why is that? I suppose modesty. I really couldn’t tell you actually why, tradition for some reason.
COWEN: I have the same issue with Iran. I’ve met many Iranians. They’re quite impressive, very smart, highly successful, especially in America. Yet the country itself is virtually always not on a good track. Clearly, there’s been some negative outside intervention in Iran, but at this point, I can’t really fully believe that’s the main problem.
There’s something about Iranian society — which I do not at all understand — that holds back a certain kind of progress. Maybe there’s some attachment to a certain impersonality in public life that they don’t have, or disputes become too fraught, or the country is not sufficiently unified, even though the people are super nice.
What is it you think that internally might be the equivalent in Afghanistan? Because there’re plenty of Afghans in Northern Virginia. They’re super nice, they’re attractive, they’ve done very well. At the same time, it is hard for me to believe that Afghanistan’s problems are mainly about foreign intervention.
MURPHY: I think in the case of Afghanistan, they’re traumatized. I think there is definitely a trauma. They’ve been at war for over 40 years. Even if you do meet people in Arlington or in DC, or wherever they’re carrying that with them. They’re dealing with family that are still there. This is going to have an effect on you. This is not an easy thing to deal with. Maybe that has something to do with it. In Iran, I suppose, is it the Iranians or is it the theocracy? I don’t know what’s holding it back.
COWEN: They’re not that separate ultimately. Iran is a difficult country to rule; it always has been. There’re so many different groups there, the Azerbaijanis. Maybe they’re afraid if they liberalize, it will collapse into some kind of chaos, or they don’t want to be the next Lebanon or the next Syria. I don’t know.
MURPHY: Do they have much choice? I don’t know how much choice they have in the theocracy.
COWEN: It has a fair amount of support. It may not be majority support, but it has more support in Iran than it would find in most countries of the world.
MURPHY: There’re a lot of traditional people there. Again, you’ve got the trauma of the Iran-Iraq war, where a lot of people were killed, and they’re dealing with loved ones who were killed in the war and betray that, betray them. That keeps people loyal. I think it’s the same in the West. In America, people will be loyal to whatever president you have because they’ve lost people in wars, the veterans. It’s very hard to break away from that. You have to tear up your history and say, “No, no, this is wrong.” I think it’s loyalty in some ways.
COWEN: What’s the food like in Afghanistan? Is it good? Is it like food in Afghan restaurants in the West? Can I just pop in and ask for kadu and it comes?
MURPHY: Yes, it can be. In fact, you can go to the most remote little village and, of course, they’re always going to have fantastic bread. The food is very much a part of the social thing. The green tea and the bread. Then, depending on the season, they’re going to have wonderful fruits. Food is good. Very meat-based. Vegans would have a hard time, I think.
COWEN: There’s a poem in your book. Of course, you didn’t write it, but I’d like to know how you understand it. I think it goes, “I lost you on Facebook yesterday. I’ll find you on Google today.” What does that mean to you as someone who’s been there a lot?
MURPHY: I just think the times have moved on, and it’s no longer just women at weddings writing this poetry. It’s a reflection of the modern world.
COWEN: Why did Russia remind you so much of pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland?
MURPHY: Friendliness, warmth, a bit of a daily struggle, sharing things, being able to laugh at things.
COWEN: And that’s changed in Ireland today, you think?
MURPHY: I’ve just come from Ireland, and it’s all still there. In fact, I think that what happened was when the Celtic Tiger happened, and then there was that terrible crash, it is reckoned that the Irish learned a lesson. I hope they have because it did seem like things were . . . As the Irish say, they lost the run of themselves. It was all about stages, and it was all about accumulating properties and all the rest of it, and going into huge debt.
I think people have learned that lesson. I’ve just come from there, and there’s a wonderful atmosphere. There’s a very small minority of people that are heading towards this far right anti-immigrant action. Very, very, very noisy on social media, so it sounds like it’s everywhere. It’s not, actually. I discovered it wasn’t. I think they’ve learned the lesson from the Celtic Tiger. I think it was a pretty shallow place back then. These are generalizations obviously. Not everyone was prone to that.
COWEN: If I were to make to you the counterintuitive claim that Northern Ireland feels like the real Ireland to me, does that make any sense to you whatsoever? To me, it’s the Ireland that is still pre-modern in many of its parts, and the Republic is not, other than maybe the west coast or parts of the deep south?
MURPHY: No, not really. I don’t think that’s true. It’s doing less well economically, that’s for sure. Southern Ireland is booming. Southern Ireland was never industrialized, so in a way, we’re catching up. We were never industrialized; the North was. We suffered terrible recessions and unemployment in the ’80s. I left Ireland in the ’80s, during that time. It was a terrible time. What do we do? We educated ourselves. We became possibly among the most educated populations on Earth.
COWEN: You’re the most, I believe. Number one.
MURPHY: Yes, could be. The North hasn’t done that, I think. Of course, people were going to college, but it was a default, almost, for people in Ireland to go to college. There wasn’t anything else to do. Why not do this? I think also there were good decisions made by the government to offer education and promote it, and that’s why I think the South is booming.
COWEN: Now, you’re old enough to have lived through the collapse of Catholic Church influence in Ireland. Did that shock you? It seems historically virtually unprecedented, or was it somehow obvious that would be happening? Why was it so quick?
MURPHY: I don’t know. It was shocking. I wasn’t living there when it was happening. I was following things somewhat. I’ve said it in one of the books: It was like growing up in Taliban, Ireland when I grew up in the ’60s in Dublin. The church had such power, and they abused that power in many ways, some terrible.
When it all started falling, it’s like the truth comes out, and when the truth comes out, it can be like a house of cards. I suppose that’s why it might’ve been sudden. If you were living there, and you were really observing this, it was probably being chipped away at. They knew things. People knew things, and it was permissible now to speak up about it and talk about it. I think it’s the church that’s fallen. I wouldn’t say religion has gone necessarily, but I think the church has really suffered.
COWEN: Being a photographer and also a filmmaker, do you think you see Irish history differently from that vantage point? If so, how?
MURPHY: You mean other people’s history?
COWEN: History of Ireland, say since 1922?
MURPHY: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think if you’re interested in the history, you’ll read around the subjects, and you’ll draw parallels. I find, though, that things I’ve done in Ireland do inform me when I go somewhere else. I look at the history, but that’s pretty true of anyone. You look at what’s relatable. Something happens to you, or you learn something about your history, and then something’s happening in Iran. “Oh, that’s interesting. There’s a parallel there.” We compare things all the time, don’t we?
COWEN: When you left, why did you leave?
MURPHY: One reason was the recession. I also left because at the time, it was a boring place for a 20-year-old. It was a boring place. If it was now, I wouldn’t be leaving. I would’ve stayed. It was a white Catholic poor country on the edge of Europe. Quite apart from that, I always wanted to travel. From an early age, I wanted to travel. So, a combination of all those things. I was going to be moving, whatever happened. Even if things had been going well, I think I would’ve wanted to taste what else is out there.
COWEN: How was it that in the Ireland of that time, you became a photographer?
MURPHY: I didn’t become a photographer in Ireland. It wasn’t until I went to America, and I bought a camera, and I had time. Also, there was a dark room near where I was living, a public dark room, and I was able to use that. I learned how to develop my black and white film and print it. That was a huge factor, to take a picture, and then be able to control it afterwards and see it.
Suddenly there was a continuation, there was consistency, something that you thought about, something that you saw, something you wanted to capture, you could then see the result. You learn from your mistakes, and when you’re printing, you really see the mistakes. It was really when I left Ireland that I learned photography.
COWEN: What had been your job in Ireland?
MURPHY: I was a student.
COWEN: You never had a proper career before being a photographer?
MURPHY: No.
COWEN: Then you went to where in the United States?
MURPHY: I went to New York, and I went to San Francisco.
COWEN: What is it you wish Americans would understand about current Ireland that maybe they do not? What’s our biggest misconception?
MURPHY: Oh. I don’t know, really. It’s too general a question because people coming to London — they’re going to have misconceptions. I don’t know they get things that wrong. I don’t think it’s necessarily a quiz. They seem to love it. They can’t all be searching for their roots. I think people love it. The atmosphere is great, and things are so easy now with transportation. It’s very expensive though, I have to say. It’s much more expensive than it was.
COWEN: I think we regard the Irish as especially friendly. I’m not sure that’s entirely wrong, to be clear, but we don’t come away necessarily from England saying the same thing. The more depressive side of the Irish personality is less apparent to visiting Americans. That would be my sense.
MURPHY: I think it’s also, anyone on holiday — they’re in a good mood. If you’re a tourist, you’re probably spending money, so people are going to be friendly to you. It’s just common decency, but also good service. Irish people going to England, for example, will come back and say, “Oh my God, the English are so friendly. They’re not like that. They’re much friendlier than we are. They’re much more polite.”
I think it’s also what you know. You walk into a shop in Ireland, and somebody will immediately maybe tell you a joke or something, which is unusual for you, but not unusual for us. Then, maybe that Irish person will go to England and go into a shop, and the person in the shop might be telling them some little bit of history or something, and because it’s different, “Oh my God, that’s so friendly.” When you’re on a holiday, you’re looking to have a good time. You’re in a good mood, so I think that has a huge effect.
COWEN: Now you’re living in Kolkata mainly?
MURPHY: No. I’m living in London, some of the year in Kolkata.
COWEN: Why Kolkata?
MURPHY: My wife is Indian. She grew up in Delhi, Bombay, and Kolkata, but Kolkata was her favorite. They were the years that were her most fond of years. She’s got lots of friends from Kolkata. I love the city. She was saying that if I didn’t like the city, then we wouldn’t be spending as much time in Kolkata as we do, but I do love the city.
It’s got, in many ways, everything I would look for in a city. Kabul, in a way, was a bit like Kolkata when times were better. This is maybe a replacement for Kabul for me. Kolkata is extraordinary. It’s got that history. It’s got the buildings. Bengalis are fascinating. It’s got culture, fantastic food.
COWEN: The best sweets in India, right?
MURPHY: Absolutely.
COWEN: It’s my daughter’s favorite city in India.
MURPHY: Really?
COWEN: Yes.
MURPHY: What does she like about it?
COWEN: There’s a kind of noir feel to it all.
MURPHY: Absolutely.
COWEN: It’s so compelling and so strong and just grabs you, and you feel it on every street, every block. It’s probably still the most intellectual Indian city with the best bookshops, a certain public intellectual life.
MURPHY: It’s widespread. It’s not just elite. It’s everyone. We went to a huge book fair. It’s like going to . . . I don’t know what it’s like going to, Kumbh Mela or something. It’s extraordinary.
There’s a huge tent right in the middle, and it’s for what they call little magazines. Little magazines are these very small publications run by one or two people. They’ll publish poetry. They’ll publish interesting stories. Sadly, I don’t speak Bengali because I’d love to be reading this stuff. There are hundreds of these things. They survive, and people buy them. It’s not just the elite. It’s extraordinary in that way.
COWEN: Is there any significant hardship associated with living there, say a few months of the year?
MURPHY: For us, no. There’s a lot of hardship —
COWEN: No pollution?
MURPHY: Yes. The biggest pollution for me is the noise, the noise pollution.
COWEN: Yes, of course.
MURPHY: The honking horns, Jesus Christ. Really, you want to rip those horns out of those cars because people don’t use their horn for any particular reason, it seems. It’s like a heartbeat.
COWEN: What’s the future of that city? It hasn’t grown as much as many other parts of India.
MURPHY: No.
COWEN: It feels run down, which maybe is part of the charm, but it becomes a problem over time. It’s deindustrializing.
MURPHY: A writer I know, who lives there, was saying that the property development is all a scam in a way. You were talking about noir. I did a project on the Art Deco homes in Kolkata. They’re wonderful. They were usually people from East Bengal, middle-class people, I suppose, fleeing partition and the war in ’71. They came to Kolkata, and they built their houses, and they loved Art Deco. They loved the modernism of Art Deco. Each house is different.
They are now being torn down to make way for flats, apartments, five-story, three-story even. The point is it’s flats, whereas these buildings would’ve housed a very extended family, maybe 20 people living in it. Now they knock these down. The reason is because the people living in Kolkata— if it’s a family, probably half the family are in Dubai. Other people are in New York or London or Delhi or Bombay, and there’s one person left, or two people left.
The property developers are knocking on the door, saying, “Hey, listen, we’ll give you this much money.” They probably want to stay, but the other people living outside India want to cash in. They don’t want to go back to the city. It’s not the future for them.
In some ways, you could say it is slightly a dying city, but there is stuff going on. There’s a very thriving art scene. You do see shops opening all the time. There’re new restaurants. I don’t know how it all works. They’re not very happy with Modi. They’re unusual in that. They’re a very diverse city, and I think they pride themselves in that, which isn’t really the Modi message. You’re right, it’s not part of the thrusting new India, and that is what its charm is, for an outsider, anyway, and for people living there. I know.
COWEN: Where else do you want to live?
MURPHY: I love London. The thing is, I moved to London in ’87, and I never thought of London as my home for many years because I was traveling a lot. It was a great base. Also, London has improved. I’ve got photographs when I arrived in London, and it was a shabby place. It was violent in many ways, more violent than it is now. It was a tough place.
I think the edges have been rounded out, and food has got a lot better. Transport seems to have got better. Everything is more expensive, and it’s very difficult in that way. It was a very shabby place when I came in ’87, but it’s really improved. For me, it’s really improved. I love London. I could live in Dublin. I think I could live in Dublin. I’d be happy between London and Kolkata, that’ll do.
COWEN: Which is your life, right?
MURPHY: Yes. Then travel, yes. I want to see more of India — that’s the other thing. Being in Kolkata, it’s a gateway to not just India but Southeast Asia. If I can combine that with work, that would be the key.
COWEN: What do you think is the future of Syria? You’ve done work there, right? A lot has changed in the last year. Is there hope? Can you go there now?
MURPHY: I think you can. I went there when I really shouldn’t have gone there in 2012. It really looked like it was all over for Assad, and then Russia came in and helped them. I did a small little multimedia piece, and I wrote the script saying that 5,000 people had been killed in 2012. What was the figure at the end of that war?
They’re wonderful people. I remember being in Syria in 2007, I think it was. I did a story for a magazine, which was in Lebanon and Syria. We went from Beirut — you could drive just across into Damascus, and it was like going from one planet to another in many ways. People were so honest and friendly. I’m not saying the Lebanese are dishonest, but there was just a very different atmosphere. They were so friendly and just a lovely, lovely, lovely place. Even in 2012, when things were really tough, people were fantastic.
The future — I don’t know. I really haven’t been following it. The problem with me is that when I stop doing work in a place, something else is taking my attention, and I’m not very good at keeping up with it. If I was supposed to go to Syria in two days, I would read all I could and get myself informed. I haven’t really been very diligent in keeping up with Syria, I’m afraid.
COWEN: Is that the most danger you’ve been in? Or would you say Nigeria or somewhere else?
MURPHY: Well, Nigeria was very dangerous. I was in two instances within hours of each other where I really thought I was going to be killed.
COWEN: Killed for what reason?
MURPHY: For being a photographer. We basically ran into…
COWEN: Boko Haram?
MURPHY: Boko Haram, yes. Literally, I was photographing through the windscreen. I thought I was just going into a money market, and I was photographing the currency exchanges. The driver didn’t tell me, this is all Boko Haram, and that’s what they do. Suddenly, they were trying to drag me out of the car. It was a horrible situation. I was with the same journalist, Eliza Griswold. We were very lucky to get out of that alive.
COWEN: How did you get out of it alive?
MURPHY: We had a driver who was very sharp and very good. He tried to talk them down. It was a mob, and they dragged him out, and they beat him up. They were after my camera, is what they were after, because they thought I had something that was of value. In the end, I gave them a card, which wasn’t the card that I’d been shooting the stuff on.
Then there was a mullah who came and tried to calm everyone down, and he did. Then it all rose up again. The atmosphere became crazy. Then there was some kind of a secret security policeman who must have been shadowing us, must have been following us, because he stepped in. It took him a long time. We were showing credentials and all the rest of it. They were really out for blood.
Then a few hours later, I was photographing on a bridge. I thought I was safe to photograph on this bridge. There were people living down below the bridge, but what happened was, people were climbing up the columns of the bridge and came running after me. The car was driving, and I had to run, open up the car door and jump in and take off.
COWEN: Like in the movies.
MURPHY: Like in the movies, yes.
COWEN: You can actually do that. You can chase a moving car and open the door and jump in.
MURPHY: First of all, it was the window. The window was open. I threw my camera in the window, and then I grabbed the door open. The guy was driving slowly enough that I could keep up with him, but fast enough that, if things got troublesome, he could lose the crowd behind me.
COWEN: If I were to say that Michigan is, for me, the American state most like Russia — visually — do you agree?
MURPHY: Looks like it. Yes, I could see that.
COWEN: What else struck you as similarities visually between the US and Russia?
MURPHY: People, people’s behavior. There’s a grandness to both places, even in the design of things. You look at things like, well, telephone boxes. We don’t really have them anymore, payphones. The American payphone — I don’t think it changed in decades, whereas payphones in the rest of the world changed every few years, redesigned. There’s a staple design, solid, and I guess it’s industrial. There’s industrial similarity between the two countries. Things are built to last.
COWEN: What led you to do a book on the visual similarities between America and Russia?
MURPHY: I’d been working on a project in America for a number of years. First of all, I wanted to do a book that was going to be in time for the 50th anniversary of On the Road, the Jack Kerouac book. I thought if I did a book on America now, that’d be a good thing. By the time 2007 came around, which is when the anniversary was, I still wanted to go. There was more I wanted to do, so I kept going, and then in 2008, I was commissioned to go to the Russian Far East and photograph the country and the life behind this huge economic boom, all the energy resources, but, really, about the people and what life was like.
That’s where the idea struck me that this is not huge. Of course, it’s very different, but there’re many, many similarities. I thought that was a very interesting conceit. We’re told that we’ve got fatal enemies, we’ve got natural enemies, and yet people from both places — they could be in either country, they could be each other at times. I thought that was an interesting idea. This idea was just an idea at that stage. Then, I continued to work on things in America. I got involved in filmmaking. I met PJ Harvey, and we had a few projects that took me away from the project.
Then Trump started coming and making noises about Putin. There was this sort of bromance. I thought, “This is very interesting. This is the old idea I had of similarities.” I decided I’d go back to Russia to see if I could do some work there. I went back in 2017 and 2019. I went back to the Urals because the Urals was the closest I could find to an equivalent in a way. The Urals are an industrial area. I’d done quite a lot of work in the Pittsburgh area, Pennsylvania. I thought that was a fair comparison.
Really, as a photographer, I’m photographing people all the time. It’s people, it’s what they’re doing, it’s their relationships with each other. It’s the funny things they do. It’s the funny things that I see. It’s the beauty that I see, how people struggle. That’s what I’m after.
It’s very easy to come up with themes when you’re looking at pictures you’ve shot, but if you’re to go out with a theme in your head, it would be quite restricting in some ways. I think the photographs wouldn’t be as interesting, for me anyway. I like that spontaneity. So, you come back, and you look at the pictures, and then you start putting together the themes, and themes present themselves, themes perhaps you hadn’t even thought about.
Right down to the very last days of putting the book together — this was a many, many years project — there were pictures that were always going to be in the edit, always going to be in. There’s no way they were going to come out. And they came out because they had to make room for this other picture that I found.
It’s a very fluid practice, and it’s a great practice. I love it. I love putting work together like that, sequencing it, editing it. These two pictures give you a certain mood, a certain feeling, a certain meaning. At one stage, I had 136 pictures in the book. That was going to be it. I couldn’t imagine taking anything out. Then over time, I started really going into the work, and I ended up with 88 pictures. By doing that, I was changing the meaning of the book. I was making it lighter in some ways. It’s a great process. I love it.
COWEN: Why don’t Russians smile more? Or do you think they do?
MURPHY: When I came back from that trip in 2008, it was for a magazine called Dispatches. I wrote a little piece, and I said something like, “Serious people make me laugh. Very serious people make me laugh a lot. Russians are the most serious people I’ve ever met.” So, they made me laugh a lot. I think what it is, is that they have this very dark sense of humor. Again, very like the Irish, there’s a dark sense of humor. I think that they’ll crack a joke, but they won’t smile, and that’s part of the joke. It’s also like you don’t even know it’s a joke, and that’s the humor.
COWEN: My wife grew up in the Soviet Union, and she has the basic view that people who smile too much are idiots.
MURPHY: [laughs] Yes.
COWEN: She and all her friends — they have excellent senses of humor.
MURPHY: Yes.
COWEN: And they’re great storytellers.
MURPHY: It’s true, but haven’t there been studies done that if you smile a lot, it makes you feel better?
COWEN: That’s right.
MURPHY: Maybe it’s a good thing to smile, but yes, there is this moody, almost like Jean-Paul Sartre existential quizzing of everything. “Ooh, why smile?” sort of thing. I don’t know.
COWEN: Did you visit Magnitogorsk in the Urals?
MURPHY: No.
COWEN: Do people in the Urals seem happy to you? I know it’s a complex question, but what’s your sense of the actual living standard?
MURPHY: I saw there were rich and poor, and there were people in the middle. I don’t think that people were happy with the regime. A lot of the people that I was hanging out with were not happy with the regime, for sure, and that was before the Ukraine war. There’s corruption. Things are tough, but they have their dachas. They eat quite well. I think, they read a lot. Again, huge generalizations, I’m afraid. It’s a huge country, but I think people are as happy as anywhere else, what I saw. People in London complain a lot. People in Paris complain a lot, but they’re also very happy.
COWEN: What was your role in the PJ Harvey album, Let England Shake?
MURPHY: Well, that was an interesting one because I’d done a book on Afghanistan in 2008 and Polly had seen the exhibition in London, and she bought the book, and she got in touch and was interested in meeting me and talking about that. At that stage, she’d been writing the songs, and she’d done a demo, so, really, she’d already done all the work. I think some of my work might have influenced her in some way by looking at pictures from Afghanistan because she wrote about the First World War, she wrote about Iraq, she wrote about Afghanistan, and she wrote about England. That was Let England Shake.
I came back from Afghanistan, actually, having shot some video for the first time, and she said, “Oh, you shoot video too? Would you like to make some music films for me?” I said, “Sure.” That was what I ended up doing. She gave me the demo. It wasn’t an album at that stage, and I put together an idea. First of all, I was going to go to Iraq and Afghanistan to shoot these music films in those places because these places were being referenced so much in the songs.
Then I thought, actually, stay in England. It’s called Let England Shake. Stay in England and find some kind of visual equivalent of that legacy. That legacy of colonies and colonialism, of the First World War, and find it in the English people, and find it in the cities and the countryside, so I ended up doing this road trip around England twice, and I shot a lot of video, and I put it together, and I made 12 short films for that album. It was making music films for that album.
COWEN: Those are on your website, right?
MURPHY: They’re on the website, yes. We thought that worked very well, and the next project we decided what we’d do is, we would actually start that project at the same time, so I would be photographing and filming, and she would be taking notes, writing poetry and songs, and we’d do some traveling together. That ended up becoming Hope Six Demolition Project. That was the name of the album.
COWEN: Do you think you and she saw something about England back then that was ahead of its time?
MURPHY: I think she did.
COWEN: What was that?
MURPHY: It was Brexit, wasn’t it? In its simplest form, it was Brexit. “God Damn Europeans” is one of the songs that starts out. It’s some person being quoted. She’s written the lyric, “God Damn Europeans.” I guess it was tapping into some kind of patriotism, nationalism.
COWEN: The further album, Hope Six Demolition Project, that came out of trips to Kosovo and Washington. Am I understanding this correctly?
MURPHY: Trips to Afghanistan. Kosovo, Washington, DC. We’d decided we’d like to travel together and see where things would take us. The promise to each other was, if we did this once and it just didn’t work, that’s fine. We wouldn’t do it.
We were invited to Kosovo, to a very good film festival called the DokuFest in Prizren, and they wanted us to do a Q&A based on my 12 short films for Let England Shake. I’d been to Kosovo during the war, and she’d already started writing some stuff, actually, based on some of my pictures. We went, and we thought, “Okay, we’ll go on this, and maybe this can be the start of the travels.” The Balkans are a fascinating place to go to, and Kosovo is at peace, but very interesting and very, very warm people.
We spent a few days in Kosovo, and we discovered that we could travel together, and we could actually produce work, and we were sort of up and running. A year later, I was in Afghanistan working on that poetry project, The Afghan Women’s Poetry Project, a book and film. It was quiet there. It was 2012. I had finished my work there; it was December. I had a very good situation with a very nice place to live, a good driver that I trusted, and I just offered, would she like to come and visit Afghanistan?
Didn’t know whether she would or not, and in the end, she did, and we did that. That was pretty extraordinary because I think what she wrote about Afghanistan was so unique. It’s a very different take. I’d never read anything like what she was writing about Afghanistan.
COWEN: How would you characterize that?
MURPHY: An artist’s eye. I mean a true artist’s vision. Small little things becoming a whole soul. In her own inimitable way, she was capturing that. It was great to do that with Afghanistan because, as you were saying about photography and what people’s perceptions are of the country, I thought this would bring a slightly different take on the place for people that would listen.
COWEN: Do you have a PJ Harvey story that you’re able to tell us?
MURPHY: Well, funnily enough, yes. [laughs] The thing that comes to mind is the weirdest story. When we were coming back from Afghanistan on Turkish Airlines . . . We had our trip, and we went to the Panjshir Valley. We had a few little scrapes, but nothing because there weren’t any Taliban there at that time. There were, but they were in other places. We didn’t go into those places. It was fairly uneventful, but there was always the possibility of something happening.
Job done, and we were flying from Kabul to London. Literally, we were just about to land. Literally, the wheels were down, and the engines were roared into action, and we took off. I just turned to her, and I said, “Jesus, I hope we’re not being kidnapped or something. This is very strange.”
We flew around for about half an hour. Nobody said a word. Everyone was freaked out. People in the airplane were looking for some kind of guidance as to what was going on. Obviously, the people that were there, the staff were all seated. That was very strange. I just thought, “What’s going on here?” She was very calm.
COWEN: What was going on?
MURPHY: Don’t know. To this day, I don’t know. Got off the plane, was happy to be on terra firma, and that was the end of it. Forgot about it. I just thought about it right now.
COWEN: Now, if you meet a young person, and that person wants to be some modified version of what you have done — photography, possibly something with cinema, multimedia projects, working with music. Of course, they should work hard, and they should be smart, but what are the traits you would look for in them to judge whether or not that was possible for them to do?
MURPHY: I think it would not be a technical thing. I think people can learn technical stuff very quickly. The technology is so accessible. I think it’s themselves. I think it’s their interests. I think it’s their curiosity. It’s a very tough field to get into. It’s very competitive. It’s changed so much since I started doing it, but that, actually, they could handle because they grew up with the technology and the way things are, so that wouldn’t be a problem for them.
I think it’s really to do it and to do it properly and to have a proper career in it and spend the time you’d need, you really have to be interested in what you’re talking about. You have to have a curiosity. You have to have a real interest and a love of it. Whether it’s the photography, whether it’s the politics, whether it’s the environment — whatever the subject is. You should always do work that you love.
Of course, you’ll have to do work that you don’t love to make a living and to get on and pay bills, but projects that you take on that take time and take a lot of energy, and many times you think it’s going to be a failure, and nothing will ever come of it — you have to love what you’re doing. You have to have an interest. I think that the biggest advice is to follow the things that you love and find a way to make it work.
COWEN: Do you feel there was a point in your career when you didn’t do that? Or you think you’ve just executed on that consistently?
MURPHY: I definitely did it. There was a period at the beginning when I was working a lot for a Swedish newspaper. Was very good pay, and they were lovely people. I was traveling around England for them. I don’t resent doing it. I’m very happy I did it. Economically, it was very stabilizing for me. I spent quite a lot of time doing that. I needed to do that because I needed to pay the bills. I wasn’t independently wealthy.
But when I did get the chance to do some traveling and do the work that I really wanted to do, it was another reality. It would’ve been nice to have done that work earlier, but that’s the way it goes.
COWEN: What do you see as having been your big breakthrough, so to speak?
MURPHY: Biggest breakthrough was the first piece I had published in England, which was about young working-class kids in Dublin having ponies in their back gardens in urban areas, inner city areas. Where they would normally have cats and dogs, they had horses. I came across this having come back from America. I saw this kid on a horseback bareback, riding past me in this urban estate. I thought, “That’s really strange.” Then again, I’d seen that. I’d grown up with this. I knew it, but having come from the outside, this was something that was very unusual for my eyes.
I followed that, and I found out that there was a horse market every month that these kids were going to. They would have races, and they would buy and sell ponies. I went to their homes, and I saw how they looked after the ponies. I did that story, and that was the first story I published in England. That was the break. That was when the Swedish newspaper saw that story and wanted me to go to Ireland with them to shoot it in color. That was the breakthrough. After that, I was off to the races, as they say.
COWEN: Two final questions. First, if our listeners want to consume more of you, where would you send them?
MURPHY: [laughs] I suppose my website, seamusmurphy.com. I’m very proud of the book that I’ve just come out with, Strange Love. It was a very long process. I think it’s very relevant to the world today, and I think it’s probably my best work.
COWEN: That’s the visual comparison of America and Russia, which I very much quite liked, to be clear. I gave a copy to my wife who will read through it.
MURPHY: Oh, did you? What did she make of it?
COWEN: She hasn’t looked at it yet, but she will. It’s in her pile.
MURPHY: Does she smile at all?
COWEN: She smiles like an American. This to me is quite striking. Of the Soviet women who come over, whether or not you marry an American, I think is such an amazing predictor of your smiling behavior 20 years later. I’m not saying they’re happier, but they do smile much more.
MURPHY: [laughs] Right, right.
COWEN: Last question: what will you do next?
MURPHY: I’m in the process of developing a film about a family that I met in Kabul in 1994, first time I was there. I stayed with them in this frontline area in the old city. There were four sons and a father, and I photographed them.
Then two years later, the Taliban came, and I managed to get down to see them just to see how they were doing. I arranged to meet them somewhere else, because if I met them in their home, it might have been dangerous for them. I found them, and two of them had been killed by the Taliban. I did a photograph again of the family. Every time I went to Afghanistan, I would check in with them and see what was going on, and I would take some pictures. That developed into a very long project, over 30 years now of photographs.
There’re two left. The two youngest sons are still living. One is living in Turkey, and one is living in Germany. None of the family are alive. Most of them were killed in the war. One of the boys that I’d met in in 1994 had already lost one leg. He’s living in Turkey; he’s got seven children. The other is living in Germany with five children. I’m making a film about them. I’m developing that at the moment with a producer in Ireland. That’s one thing. Then there’re always other things I’m doing. I’m going back to Ireland. I’ve just come from Ireland. There’re a couple of ideas that I was researching. I’m trying to put them into practice.
COWEN: Seamus Murphy, thank you very much.
MURPHY: Thank you very much.
Seamus’ work from his latest book, Strange Love, will be featured in an exhibition in London from October 17- November 2, 2025.