Peter Costello
The Republic
photographed by Seamus Murphy
(Allen Lane, €32.00)
All too often we think of photographic books about Ireland as consisting of brilliant sunsets, waves breaking on sea-weedy rocks, and long green fields fading into purple mountains. The shops are full of this kind of stuff.
Here, however, by a true photographer, is a real book. When I say true photographer I am thinking of artists like John Minihan, or Alan MacWeeny or Euan Duff.
Murphy grew up in Ireland, but lives and works in London. He has received many awards for his work – seven times from the World Press Photo Foundation. This book, for which he has written an evocative afterword, which provides a biographical setting, but again not one of an ordinary kind, represents the vision of an eye which has seen parts of the world that are tormented and whose beauty consists of what can be found that expresses the resilience of life there, but are not always ‘beautiful’ in an easy sense.
There is nothing superficial about these images; they go to the very heart of things. Filled with pain, unease and anguish, but also violence, enthusiasm and passion, Seamus Murphy’s images just have to be seen.
The book has been published in a novel form of binding that allows the images over two pages to be viewed flat, but one might have liked a slightly larger size. However, for anyone who wants to see – and to think about – Ireland as she is today this is an important book. The invocation of our troubled past is often subtle, the question asked is Yeats’ still unanswered question to himself:
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed …
