A Photographic Life - 126: Plus Seamus Murphy

In episode 126 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed questioning the need to deconstruct photography, considering the state of art photography, setting up your own photo talks and revealing how the podcast is constructed.  Plus this week photographer Seamus Murphy takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’ Seamus Murphy grew up in Ireland and is now based in London. He is the recipient of seven World Press Photo awards for his photographic work in Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Peru and Ireland. Seamus received The World Understanding Award from POYi in the USA for his work from Afghanistan and a film he made based around this work was nominated for an Emmy and won the Liberty in Media Prize in 2011. His work has been published and exhibited widely. He has made films for The New Yorker and Channel 4 Television in the UK and is the author of four books including A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan in 2008 and I Am The Beggar of the World in 2014. Seamus has collaborated with the musician PJ Harvey on her projects Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project, for which he won a Q Award for Best Music Film in 2016. Murphy and Harvey collaborated on The Hollow of the Hand published in 2015, a book of his photography and her poetry. An exhibition and live presentation of The Hollow of the Hand work took place at the Royal Festival Hall, London in 2015 and at Les Recontres d’Arles in France in 2016. His latest book The Republic is an immediate and personal portrait of Ireland and was exhibited at The Little Museum in Dublin in 2017. www.seamusmurphy.com Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Taylor Francis 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Taylor Francis 2019). His next book What Does Photography Mean to You? will be published in late 2020.