Seamus Murphy
Seamus Murphy began photographing Afghanistan in 1994, and his new book A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan, is a classic on the rise of the Taliban and...
Read more ›In The Dark Places
on 03 December 2011Over the next twelve days we will be featuring a new music video
featuring PJ Harvey by Seamus Murphy daily. The accompanying text
by Seamus will give an insight into his thoughts about making the
videos. ENJOY!
Opening the film is west Londoner Ro Allerton, with Trellick Tower
in the background. Ro is the same age as the soldier whose lines he
recites from the song. Then a montage from Edgware Road. I like the
hipster who goes his own way - exiting frame right - at the end of
the sequence. Birds' flying in formation is in Holkham, Norfolk,
shot from the pinewoods. Nosing around the City of London one
Sunday morning I saw a figure disappear through the door of a
tower. I chased him up the spiralling steps to the top where he
joined fellow bell ringers in the belfry of the church of St Magnus
the Martyr, London Bridge. The church is mentioned in Dickens'
Oliver Twist. They were just about to start ringing, and wanting to
film, I explained I was shooting pictures for a musician called PJ
Harvey. One of them said: "PJ Harvey's my mate. I did her kitchen".
They let me shoot, the carpenter was indeed an old friend and
really had done her kitchen. He joined us a few months later for
one of the Troxy shows. Amongst the rest of the imagery is a view
of a colour contact sheet, through a magnifying loupe, of fighters
on the plains outside Kabul in Afghanistan. 9/11 had happened 2
months before and this was Novem¬ber 2001, the day before the fall
of Kabul to the Northern Alliance, and the ousting of the Taliban.
The apparent effortlessness of this success likely fed the thinking
towards the invasion of Iraq 2 years later. Dark places. The final
shot in the film was taken through a grill looking down on the
bells the ringers were pulling that Sunday morning. English poet
John Donne wrote in 1624 "any man's death diminishes me, because I
am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
PJ Harvey Web Site
England Photo Essay by Seamus Murphy