Gazastan, Takhar Province, November 2004. A miner working in a coal mine. Gazastan is inhabited by Afghan Arabs, who are reputed to have arrived centuries earlier from Saudi Arabia.
A Darkness Visible: Seamus Murphy
Dasht-e-Qala, Takhar Province, November 2000. A father with his daughter, ill with malaria, waits for treatment at a Swedish Committee clinic.
Ghulam Ali, Parwan Province, November 2001. A young girl soon after dawn in the village of Ghulam Ali on the Shamali Plain. Fighting between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, along with massive US airstrikes, made the plain a critically dangerous place to live.
Kabul October 2004 A celebrant at a Sufi ceremony that has lasted throughout the night in the Old City.
Seamus Murphy
A Darkness Visible: Seamus Murphy
Aaron Schuman
The photographer, Seamus Murphy, has received numerous international honours including six World Press Photo Awards, a 2005 World Understanding Award, and most recently the 2007 W. Eugene Fellowship Grant. From 1994 to 2007, Murphy photographed regularly inside Afghanistan, concentrating on the tumultuous years of civil war, the invasion after 9/11, and the historical elections following the fall of the Taliban. Alongside scenes of war and politics, his photographs often capture intimate images of domesticity, work and leisure, all of which has culminated in the release of A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan, published by Saqi Books in 2008. An exhibition of the work is currently on show at Asia House Gallery in London (1st July - 13 September 2008).
Aaron Schuman: Firstly, how did you become a photographer?
Seamus Murphy: I started out wanting to be a journalist, so I went to a communications college in Dublin, but got turned onto video and film more than anything else. After graduating, I went to the States and seriously picked up a camera for the first time there. In San Francisco, there was a darkroom where I began to print all of my own pictures, and I also started discovering all these amazing photography books. They had great bookshops, and yard sales with incredible books by people like Garry Winogrand for a dollar, so I devoured all of those. Then, when I came back to London I started working in the film business, but hated it pretty instantly – it was commercials and pop videos, and it just seemed pretty mindless. So I thought, ‘I love photography, and I seem to know what I’m doing.’ So I gave it a go.
AS: What was your first successful story as a photographer?
SM: I was back in Ireland visiting family, and my father was a doctor in Dublin – he had a huge practice in this working-class area. I was in the car waiting for him while he made a house call, and I saw these kids walking by on ponies, like cowboys. I’d been away long enough that it seemed strange to me, but it was also familiar because I remembered seeing it before, so I thought, ‘That’s probably very strange to an outsider.’ Eventually, I found out that there was a market once a month that had been resurrected by these kids – a kind of medieval horse market – so I went down there the next Sunday, and it was amazing. There were cobblestones, and they were racing the horses down the street at six in the morning. So I took some black-and-white pictures, brought them into the Independent, and they ran them on the whole back page. That was the first thing that really worked for me, because a Swedish newspaper saw them, and their London correspondent rang me up and said, ‘We’d love you to go back with us and do it in color’. I started working for them a lot, so I had a fairly steady income.
AS: What first brought you to Afghanistan?
SM: Well, Afghanistan has such a mystique. My sister had been there on the hippy trail, so I’d heard lots of things about it. And then an assignment was offered. I was working with an Irish writer, he pitched two ideas to a paper – Chechnya or Kabul – and they said, ‘We’ve had lots of pitches about Chechnya. Why don’t you go to Kabul.’ No one was going to Kabul at the time; this was 1994, and it was a forgotten war.
AS: What was the idea behind the pitch?
SM: Well, it was very vague, and not very well paid. But we got help from an NGO, and so we spent a month there, ended up doing a story for The Observer, and then I found something else that I sold to the Irish papers. We went to the south of the city with the Red Cross – an insurgent area, which was quite dodgy – and drove to a hospital. We weren’t allowed to talk to anyone or do anything, but when we got back into the ambulance there was a little coffin. Then this man got in looking very sad. It was the father of this child, and we ended up driving him back to his village in Kabul to bring the body of his son to his wife and family – they didn’t even know he’d died. So as we were coming towards the village, people saw the ambulance and could see him. They just put two and two together and started screaming as they followed the ambulance. Then he got out and walked along with everyone through the alleyways with the coffin, and suddenly we heard this screaming. It was the mother; the word had come to her. So I photographed all of that.
AS: How do you pull out the camera gracefully in such a delicate situation? How do you make sure that it’s okay with your subjects at a moment like that?
SM: Well, we didn’t know the whole story until after the fact, so we were just gathering information without really knowing what was going on. I started taking pictures in the vehicle – one or two pictures – and there was no reaction. The man was just in another world whether I was taking pictures or not so it wasn’t an issue; I was invisible and luckily so, because I wouldn’t want to have intruded on their grief, but I did want to record this. Also, there is a sense of duty when you go to these places – if you don’t come back with the pictures then what the hell are you doing there. Afterwards, someone filmed an interview with the father, and he was very keen on telling his story. What had actually happened was that they had gone to the south of the city where they had a garden, and they were farming in the garden to get vegetables for their household in Kabul – at the time the city was under siege, and there was a blockade so no food was getting in. Suddenly, a rocket came in from the Massoud side, and killed the son. So the father wanted to tell that story, because everyone was saying that Massoud was a great guy – and Massoud generally was a great guy – but good guys also kill people in war. He wanted to get that point across, and was adamant that the story got out there.
AS: Can you discuss the relationship between the photographer and writer in those situations?
SM: I like to work with writers that I know, and a lot of the writers that I’ve been assigned to work with have become friends. In 1996, I went to Afghanistan for a second time for British GQ, and the writer who I got assigned with was Anthony Loyd, who ended up writing the introduction to A Darkness Visible. Actually, I’ve just been in Mexico with him doing a story about the drug cartels. So I have a friendly relationship with a number of writers, and generally the people that I work with appreciate photography in its own right.
AS: So did you continue to return to Afghanistan on assignment after that, or did you go back on your own as well?
SM: Both. As I said, I went in ’96 for GQ – earlier that year Taliban had taken Herat, which was a big upset, so that was kind of the hook for them. But they were very slow to publish the story, and by the time they were getting around to publishing it, Taliban had taken Kabul. They were going to run the story without Kabul, but I said, ‘It doesn’t make sense. If you’re talking about Taliban control, Kabul is huge news and you’re going to be scooped by all the newspapers.’ So I went back for very little money – I’m not even sure if they paid me – but I picked up assignments here and there. Over the years, I’ve also worked for The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, The Times, and I’ve gone with nothing. I did two trips in 2004, and I had a little work from Newsweek but not that much, so I just travelled around. A lot of A Darkness Visible is based on that trip, because I wasn’t worrying too much about deadlines and it was a very free and easy period.
AS: Who has inspired your work?
SM: Not that many war photographers. Henri Cartier-Bresson of course. And Lartigue, who I think is very funny and original. William Klein was amazing, and Robert Frank. I think what James Nachtwey does is extraordinary, but I haven’t really been inspired by war photography.
AS: So what originally drove you to want to photograph wars, conflicts, cartels, the Taliban and so on?
SM: Good stories, interesting places, interesting people. I’m very interested in eccentric people – people that make you think twice about what they’re doing and how they do it. Conflict and war is history as well; there’s a sense of recording history, without sounding pompous. I got that sense very much in Afghanistan once 9/11 happened. I realized that I had been there when most people weren’t, I had pictures of Massoud and now he was dead and so on. So this work is historical, it’s important, and it can’t be repeated.
AS: A Darkness Visible has ‘historical’ images of Massoud and Karzai, but it also has everyday stories about family and daily life in Afghanistan. How did you resolve your edit of fourteen years worth of work?
SM: There were two designers that worked on it and they had very different takes, which was very useful. Then I went to Mark Edwards, from Still Pictures, and he said, ‘You should go back to your archive.’ And he was right – we threw the whole thing up in the air, and found more pictures. We forgot about chronology and decided to just edit and sequence it based on how it flowed visually. There was one point when there was just one dead body too many – there were four in a row, and then a very strong fifth, but the designer said, ‘Look, four is making the point. They’re all in one location, rather than peppered through the book. You don’t want to give the impression that death is always around the corner in Afghanistan – it’s not true and not the point. So we can keep them all in one place, but five is just too many.’ Also, I really wanted to mix everyday domestic life with the horror, because that actually makes the horror much more translatable, amenable, and more familiar to us as viewers. If there’s too much of ‘the other’, it becomes about ‘them’ and ‘us’ rather than the human experience altogether. Of course, at times it is exotic, but that’s their life and as a photographer you use what’s in front of you to the best of your ability. Some people may say you’re exoticizing, or glamourizing, or aestheticizing, but I think that’s complete bullshit. As a photographer, you try to make the best picture you can, and to hell with the begrudgers. Also I think there’s a dignity to some of the death pictures – this is their last moment.
AS: What’s the story behind the image in which the dead man’s shoes have been taken off and set carefully to side of his body?
SM: I think that he must have been praying when he was killed. Also, there’s one where the light is reflecting off a stream of blood coming from a body on the road – the blood is actually coming from the man’s groin, so I expect that he was castrated before he was killed; or perhaps he was killed by being castrated, and then left to bleed to death. It’s pretty chilling.
AS: In light of such horrific scenes, do you feel you can build relationships with the people who commit these acts, the people whom you’re often photographing?
SM: Yes, I do. Some of them are wonderful people, and I actually find that their character reminds me of the Irish – they’re quite wild, quite lawless, and they remind me of the people from the west of Ireland. My father was from the west, and whenever I visit that part of the country there’s a beauty to the countryside and a wildness to the people, which is not that far from my experience in Afghanistan.
AS: How did you contact and get the opportunity to photograph Massoud?
SM: I first met with him in 1996, with Anthony. He had a press office in Kabul because he was in control of the city at the time. So we made contact, waited and then got a call in the middle of the night saying, ‘He’ll see you now.’ The second time was in 2000 – he’d lost Kabul and was in the north, so we got in touch with his people in advance and they flew us in. We were up there with him for about a month, went to the front with him once, did a couple of interviews and that was it. We didn’t actually spend that much time with him – he was very busy.
AS: Within the book, Massoud’s presence is very strong despite the fact that there are only a few pictures of him. Even in the way that you photograph him, there’s a certain reverence.
SM: Well, it was pretty hard not to be reverent. Without promoting one particular leader over another, he did strike me as being very honourable. To this day, people who are not even from his tribe still have respect for him – they may not have liked his politics, he may not have been devout enough in their minds, but they respect him and always thought that he was an amazing tactician, warrior and strategist. He would have been one of the unifying guys. Although just the other day I was thinking about if he was around now, after 9/11, would he put up with what the Americans are doing?
AS: How has photographing Afghanistan changed since 9/11?
SM: It is quite different. There are places that I went two years ago but wouldn’t go back to now. There’s a smuggling area right by the North-West Frontier Province where I photographed. It’s a tribal area, and we all know who’s probably in there. The first time, I happened to get lucky because I got in touch with the commander of the border police, and he gave me a policeman to take me around there. But I tried to go back there recently, and they said, ‘You can’t go there!’ I said, ‘But I was there two years ago,’ and they were like, ‘Naw, you weren’t!’ So I showed them the pictures and they said, ‘Woah, how did that happen!’ I wasn’t even supposed to go there then, but now it’s absolutely impossible.
AS: Do you think that young Afghanis can even conceive of a world that doesn’t have the constant presence of war? Has war become a right of passage?
SM: No, they don’t love it. I was back in 2007, and I went to visit a commander that Anthony and I used to hang out with – a warlord during the civil war, but now he’s in road manufacturing. I asked him, ‘Do you miss those days?’ And he said, ‘Every day we were worried that we were going to die. It was horrible.’ This is a guy who used to talk about fighting with real relish, but you could see that after four or five years of relative peace in that region, he was getting on with his life. Even though they don’t bitch about war, it doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t rather have a normal life.
AS: When you’re wandering around Kabul or a village, what’s people’s reaction to you as a Westerner, particularly after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan?
SM: Well, the thing is that 9/11 was very good for them – obviously not for the ones who are being killed by the Americans or taken away to Bagram – but generally, Afghanistan was forgotten and neglected until very recently. The Taliban was really beginning to take over the country, and the UN was already making noises, saying, ‘You know, we could probably do business with the Taliban – they’re not that bad.’ That’s the future they were facing. So actually they welcome the intervention, because it might mean jobs or stability – I mean ultimate stability, not just basic survival under the reign of the Taliban. This is not a nation of extremists, and it’s not in their nature. Two Jews lived in Kabul throughout the reign of the Taliban. These are very tolerant people, and it’s interesting that when you talk to Westerners who went through Afghanistan on the hippy trail, they always rave about it – India was lovely, Iran was nice but there were odd police, but when you got to Afghanistan you could smoke lots of dope and people were really funny; more hippy than the hippies, that’s how the Afghans were.
AS: Why did you choose to shoot Afghanistan in black-and-white?
SM: When I went initially, I shot both colour and black-and-white. But Afghanistan is such a rich visual experience, and with colour it’s overwhelming – you get lost and distracted by the beauty of the colours. If you imagine this book in colour, it would be completely different.
AS: It becomes more about the content and the people within the images, rather than the ‘feel’ or atmosphere of the place?
SM: I think so and ultimately this book is meant to be about the people. It also suits this subject because it is an old war, it’s an old country, and it looks so old – I don’t know, it just feels right to be black-and-white.
AS: Do you still shoot traditionally – Leica, Tri-X, and so on?
SM: Yes. Some of these are digital, because I was on assignment and they wanted the possibility of having it quickly in case something big happened, but up until 2001 I shot only on film. I even did the big American invasion on film – for The New York Times Magazine – and we missed all of the deadlines. But otherwise, I wouldn’t have the quality of images that I now have because it was only a 7MB file in those days. After that experience I bought a digital camera, but given the choice I’ll always choose film, particularly if it’s in black-and-white.
AS: Do you ever come into conflict with editors, in terms of them saying, ‘We can’t wait three weeks for you to get back’?
SM: Well, it became a huge thing with The New York Times during the invasion, because my plan was to airlift the film out, which is what I’d always done in other situations. But none of us knew that the Americans were going to close the bloody airspace. So what ended up happening was that I gave the film to a French television crew, who then went on holiday smoking dope in the mountains. Seriously. They’re own offices in Paris were freaked out; they just took a detour for two weeks, so I missed the deadline. That’s the truth, or at least that’s what I was told, and there was a lot of trouble. But the photo-editor, Kathy Ryan, loves the book and hopefully has forgiven me by now.
AS: With the dominance of television, the growing influence of the internet, and the introduction of citizen journalism, what role do you think photojournalism now serves in the 21st century?
SM: I think it’s ever more important, because this is the age when newspapers are running pictures given to them by the military. That can’t be right – I don’t care how good or how neutral they are, I just don’t think that’s going in the right direction. There was a time when newspapers and magazines wouldn’t accept freebies, and now they take in reader’s bloody pictures. So I think the role of the photojournalist is increasingly important.
AS: But do you think that there’s a future for the still image on the printed page?
SM: I think so. Books and exhibitions will definitely last, and as for printed media I would have thought so. I think that the race towards multimedia is a lot of hot air. Everyone seems to be running slideshows these days, but often the content isn’t very interesting; it’s just filling space.
AS: I find it strange that slideshows and videos are hailed as the next big thing, because everyone is always complaining about how they’re starved of time, but these things take up loads of time. The duration is dictated by the maker rather than the viewer, whereas with the still image, you can look at a picture for an hour or for half a second, but inevitably it will communicate something to you almost immediately. It has impact.
SM: It makes me wonder why no one has any time anymore – is it because everyone’s in their office making or looking at fucking slideshows? How many bloody slideshows do we need? I don’t see anything in multimedia that knocks me out. People talk about websites that are doing amazing things, but I haven’t seen them. Have you?
AS: PixelPress is very impressive.
SM: I haven’t come across that yet. I’ll have a look.
AS: And Magnum has done some interesting things.
SM: Yeah some, but others are dreadful - you have to wade through them. You generally pick up a newspaper or magazine because you have some kind of connection with the editorial line, the quality of the editing, and the selection of the pictures. But on these websites, there seems to be no editorial control – they just bang it all in there, and make it as messy and noisy as possible. Then they tell everyone that they can’t pay them because they’re not going to make any money out of it, which is horseshit because their actually waiting for when it’s time to get advertising so they can say, ‘We’ve got a million hits.’ It’s fine, let them do it, but if this is the alternative to what used to be newspapers and magazines, then I think it’s pretty sad.
AS: When you see young photographers just starting out in the field, do you think that they have a realistic future in photojournalism, seeing as it’s a dwindling climate?
SM: It’s a changing climate, but I don’t think it’s dwindling. If anything, I think that it’s expanding. But what’s changed is that you’re now expected to take the pictures, do some sound recording, maybe do some video and so on. More is expected of you, less money’s available, and your time is divided. So the quality of the images definitely suffers because you’re doing two things at once – you don’t have the time or the focus, that’s for sure. But maybe that doesn’t matter. Looking at some of the more interesting multimedia pieces, they work as narratives – the quality of the images wouldn’t make it into a magazine, but yet they work in that field, so it’s going in another direction. And we’re all using it, we’re all guilty. But if you’re asking me if there’s a future for photojournalism, I think there is, but it’s just a different future. I do worry about the quality of imagery though, and the thought given to what’s called journalism.
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