YouSaid · the spoken record

Seamus Murphy

lines on the record: 76
first: 2025-09-03
most recent: 2025-09-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There's two left. Two sons, the two youngest sons are still living. One is living in Turkey and one is living in Germany. So none of the family are alive. Most of them are killed during the war, in the war. One of the boys that I'd met 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. And I'm making a film about them. And I'm developing that at the moment with a producer in Ireland. So that's one thing. Yeah. And then there's always other things I'm doing. I'm going back to Ireland. I've just come from Ireland. There's a couple of ideas that I was researching and I'm trying to put them into practice. Yeah.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, 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. And there were four sons and a father. And I photographed them. And then two years later, the Taliban came and I managed to get down to see them just to see how they were doing. And I arranged to meet them somewhere else because I met them in their home. It might have been dangerous for them. And I found them and two of them had been killed by the Taliban. And I did a photograph again of the family. And every time I went to Afghanistan, I would check in with them and see what was going on. And I would take some pictures. And that developed into a very long project, over 30 years now of photographs.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose my website, you know, SeamusMurvy.com. I'm very proud of the book that I've just come out with Strange Love. It was a very, very long process. And I think it's very relevant to the world today. And I think it's probably my best work.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 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. And I came across this having come back from America, I saw this skate on horseback, bareback, walking past me in this urban estate. I thought that's really strange. But 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. So I followed that and I found out that there was a horse market every month that these kids were going to. And they would have races and they would buy and sell ponies. And I went to their homes and I saw, you know, how they looked after the ponies. And I did that story. And that story was the first story I published in England. And that was the break. That was suddenly, that was when the Swedish newspaper saw that story and wanted me to go to Ireland with them to shoot it in color. And that was the breakthrough after that. I was off the races, as they say.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely did it. It was a period towards the beginning when I was working a lot for a Swedish newspaper and it was very good pay and they were lovely people. I was traveling around England for them and I don't resent doing it and I'm very happy I did it and economically it was very stabilizing for me. But I spent quite a lot of time doing that and I needed to do that because I needed to pay the bills. I wasn't independently wealthy. But then 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 have been nice to have done that work earlier, but that's the way it goes.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take time, you know, 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. So I think that would be the biggest advice. Follow the things that you love and find a way to make it work.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it would not be a technical thing. I mean, I think people can learn technical stuff very quickly and that technology is so kind of accessible. I think it's themselves. I think it's their interests. I think it's their curiosity. I think 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. But 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. And you should always do work that you love. I mean, 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.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know to this day, I don't know. Got off the plane, was happy to be on Terra Ferma, and that was the end of it. Forgot about it. I just thought about it right now.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just turned on and said, Jesus, I hope we're not being kidnapped or something. This is very strange. And we flew around for about half an hour. Nobody said a word. Nobody came on the, I mean, 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 the staff were kind of all seated. So that was very strange, very strange thought. I just thought, you know, what's going on here? She was very cone.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fine enough Yes. The thing that comes to mind is the weirdest stories when we were coming back from Afghanistan. Turkish Airlines. So we had our trip and we went to the Panchia Valley and we had a few little scrapes but nothing because there weren't any Taliban there at that time. I mean, there were, but they were in other places. We didn't go to those places. So it was fairly uneventful. But, you know, there was always the possibility of something happening. And so, you know, job done and we were flying from Kabul to London. And literally, we were just about to land. I mean, literally the wheels were down. And the engines were roared into action and we took off.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An artist's eye amid a true artist's vision, no small little things becoming a whole soul, and then in her own and intimate way, you know, she was capturing that. And I think the country was, you know, 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.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was pretty extraordinary because I think what she wrote about Afghanistan was so unique. It was a very different take. I'd never read anything like what she was writing about Afghanistan.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went and we thought, okay, we'll go on this, and maybe we should start. This could be the start of the travels. And the Balkans are a fascinating place to go to. And Kosovo is at peace, but very, very interesting and very, very warm people. And so 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. And then I was a year later I was in Afghanistan working on that poetry project, the Afghan women's poetry project and book and film. And it was quiet there. It was 2012. I finished my work there. It was December. 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? I didn't know whether she would or not. In the end, she did. And we did that.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Troops to Washington, Afghanistan, yes, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Washington, D.C. We'd sort of decided we'd like to travel together and see where things would take us. And they promised to each other was like, you know, if we did this once and it just didn't work, that's fine. We wouldn't do it. But we were invited to Kosovo to a very good film festival called the Doku Fest in Prizren. And they wanted us to do a Q&A based on my 12 short films for Leningland Shake. I'd been to Kosovo during the war and she'd already started writing.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While it was Brexit, wasn't it? I mean, in its simplest form, it was Brexit. Goddamn Europeans is one of the songs it starts out. You know, it's some person being quoted, or she's written the lyric, goddamn Europeans. I guess I was tapping into some kind of patriotism, nationalism.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're on the website. Yeah. And the next project, 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 do some traveling together. And that ended up becoming hope-sake demolition project. That was the name of the album.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I put together an idea which was, 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. And then I thought, actually, stay in England. It's called Let Eng England Shake. Stay in England and find some kind of equivalent 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.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And at that stage she'd been writing the book, sorry, 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 looking at pictures from Afghanistan. But because she wrote about this First World War, she wrote about Iraq. She wrote about Afghanistan. And she wrote about England. That was led England shake. So 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? And I said, sure. So that was what I ended up doing. She gave me the demo. It wasn't an album at that stage.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, what I saw they were rich and poor, you know, and there were people in the middle. You know, 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. Corruption. You know, things are tough. But, you know, 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. You know what I saw? You know, people in London complain a lot. People in Param complain a lot, but they are also very happy.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true, you know. But haven't there been studies done that if you smile a lot, you actually, it makes you feel better. That's right. Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing to smile. But yeah, there is this sort of moody.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they don't think they're as serious as I came back from that trip in 2008. It was for a magazine called Dispatchers and I wrote a little piece and I said something like, serious people make me laugh. Very serious people make me laugh a lot. And Russians are the most serious people I've ever met. So they made me laugh a lot. And 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. And I think that they'll crack a joke, but they won't smile. That's part of the joke. And it's also like, you know, you don't even know it's a joke. And that's the humor.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So 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, certain feeling, certain meaning. You know, at one stage, I had 136 pictures in the book. That was going to be it. I couldn't imagine taking anything out. And then over time, I started really going into the work and I ended up with 88 pictures, you know. And 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.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very easy to come up with themes when you're looking at pictures you've shot. But if you were 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. So I like that spontaneity. So you come back and you look at the pictures and then you start putting together the themes. The themes present themselves. Themes perhaps you hadn't even thought about. I mean, right down to the very last days of putting the book together, you know, this was a many, many years project. There were pictures that were always got to be in the edit, always got to be and 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.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I thought that was a fair comparison. But 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. People struggle, you know, that's what I'm after. And, you know,”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enemies. And yet people from both places could be in either country. They could be each other at times. And I thought that was an interesting idea. And this idea, it was just an idea at that stage. And then I continued to work on things in America. I got involved in filmmaking. I met PJ Arvey and we had a few projects that kind of took me away from the project. And then Trump started coming and making noises about Putin and there was this sort of bromance. And I decided I'd go back to Russia and see if I could do some work there. So 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. So the Urals are an industrial area. I'd done quite a lot of work in the Pittsburgh area, Pennsylvania.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've been working on a project on America for a number of years, and I wanted to, 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 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, you know, really about the people and what life is like. And that's where the idea struck me that, you know, this is not huge. Of course, it's very different. But there's many, many similarities. And I thought that was a very interesting conceit. You know, we're told that we got fatal enemies. We've got natural.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People's behavior. There's a kind of grandness to both places even in the design of things. I mean, you know, you look at things like, well, telephone boxes, we don't really have them anymore, you know, payphones. But the American pay phone, you know, I don't think it changed in decades. Whereas payphones in the rest of the world, you know, they changed every few years, redesigned. So there's a kind of a staple designed, solid, and I guess it's industrial. There's industrial similarity between the two countries. Things are built to last.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally, 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, you know, he 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.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then a few hours later, I was photographing on a bridge and people, I thought I was safe to photographing 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. And I had to literally run. The car was driving and I had to run, open up the car, jump in and take off.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a driver who was very sharp and very good, and he sort of 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, and then it all rose up again. The atmosphere became crazy. And then there was some kind of secret, like security policeman who must have been shadowing us, must have been following us because he stepped in. Took him a long time with showing credentials and all the rest of it. They were really out for blood.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For being a photographer, we basically ran into Bogora, literally, literally, I was photographing through the windscreen, I thought I was just going into a money market and I was photographing the currency exchanges and the driver didn't tell me, no, this is all Boko Haram. That's what they do. And so suddenly they were trying to drag me out of the car. It was a horrible situation. I was with the same journalist as Eliza Grizzold. We're very lucky to get out of that alive.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nigeria was very dangerous. Yeah. I mean, I was in two instances within hours of each other where I really thought I was going to be killed.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honest and friendly. I'm not saying the Lebanese are dishonest, but there was just a very different atmosphere, and they were so friendly and just a lovely, lovely, lovely place. And, you know, even in 2012, when things were already tough, people were fantastic. So the future, I don't know. I really haven't been following it. The problem with me is that when I stopped doing work in place, something else is taking my attention and I'm not very good at keeping up with, you know, if I was supposed to go to Syria in two days, I would read all I could and get myself informed. So I haven't really been very, very diligent in keeping up with Syria, I'm afraid.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And that went on for, you know, I think I did a small little multimedia piece and I wrote the script saying that 5,000 people had been killed in 2012. I mean, what was the figure at the end of that war? And a wonderful people. I mean, I remember being in Syria in 2007, I think it was. I did a story for a magazine which was in Lebanon and Syria and 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...”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and then truffled, yeah, yeah. I want to see more of India. That's the other thing. Being in Calcutta, it's a gateway to not just India, but Southeast Asia. If I can combine that with work, that would be the key.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love London. And the thing is, I moved to London in 1987, and I never thought of London as my home for many years because I was travelling a lot. It was a great base. But actually over the years, and also London has improved. London was, I mean, 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. The edges have been surrounded 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. But it was a very shabby place when I came in 87, but it's really improved. And for me, it's really improved. So I love London. I could live in Dublin, I think. I could live in Dublin. I'd be happier between London and Calcutta. That'll do. And then travel.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways, you could say it is slightly a dying city, but there is stuff going on. You know, there's a very thriving arts scene. You do see shops opening all the time. There's new restaurants. Very diverse city, and I think they pride themselves on that, which isn't really the Modi message. So 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”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Flats apartments, five story, three story even. But the point is it's flats, whereas these buildings would have housed a very extended family, maybe 20 people living in it. Now they knock these down. And the reason is because the people living in Calcutta, if it's a family, there's 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. And the property developers are knocking 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.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, and somebody was saying, a writer I know who lives there was saying that the property development is all a kind of a scam in a way. What they're doing is, you were talking about noir. I did a project on the Art Deco houses, homes in Calcutta. They're wonderful. They're usually people from East Bengal, middle class people, I suppose, you know, fleeing partition and the war in 1971. And they came to Calcutta and they built their houses. They loved Art Deco. They loved the modernism of Art Deco. And each house is different. They are now being torn down to make way for...”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, and you know the biggest pollution for me is the noise. Yes, of course. The honking horns. Jesus Christ. I mean, really, you want to rip those horns out of those cars.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, and it's widespread. It's not just an elite. Everyone, we went to a book fair, huge book fair. I mean, you know, this is like, you know, you go there and it's like going to, I don't know what it's like going to Kumbamela or something. It's extraordinary. And there's a huge tent right in the middle. And it's, they call little magazines. And little magazines are these sort of very small publications run by one or two people and they'll publish poetry, they'll publish interesting stories. Sadly, I don't speak Bengali because I'd love to be reading the stuff. But, you know, and there are hundreds of these things. And they survive and people buy them. And so it's not just the elite. It's extraordinary in that way.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wife is Indian, she grew up in Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta, but Calcutta was her favourite, and they were the years that were her most formidable years. She's got lots of friends from Calcutta. I love the city. I mean, she was saying that, you know, if I didn't like the city, then we wouldn't be spending as much time in Calcutta as we do. But I do love the city. It's got in many ways everything I would look for in a city. And, you know, Kabul, in a way, was a bit like Calcutta when times were better. And this is maybe a replacement for Kabul for me. You know, Calcutta is extraordinary, and it's got that history, it's got the buildings, the people are very Bengalis are fascinating, it's got culture, fantastic food.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think it's also anyone on holiday, they take away, you know, they're in a good mood. And if you're a tourist, you're probably spending money. So people are going to be, you know, they're going to be friendly to you. It's like, you know, 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 friendly than we are. They're much more polite. I think it's also what you know, you know, like you walk into a shop in Ireland and somebody will immediately maybe tell you a joke or something, which is kind of unusual for you, but not usual for us. Not unusual for us. And then maybe that Irish person would go to England going to 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. Yeah, when you're on holiday, you're looking to have a good time. You're in a good mood. So I think that has a huge effect.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know really It's too general a question. I mean, you know, because everyone coming to London, they're going to have this conceptions. I don't know. I don't know they get things that wrong. I mean, I don't think it's necessarily a quiz. I think they seem to love it. They can't all be just searching for their roots. I think people love it. The atmosphere is great. And things are so easy now with transportation and everything else. It's very expensive, though, I have to say. It's much more expensive than it was”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't really become a photographer in Ireland. It wasn't until I went to America. I bought a camera. And I had time and also there was a dark room near where I was living, a public darkroom. And I was able to use that. I learned how to develop my black and white film and print it. And that was a huge factor suddenly 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. So it was really, when I left Ireland that I learned photography.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I left, well, one reason was the recession. I also left because at the time it was a boring. If it was now, I wouldn't be leaving. I would have stayed. It was, you know, a white Catholic, poor country on the edge of Europe. And quite apart from that, I always wanted to travel from an early age I wanted to travel. So a combination of all those things, you know, I was going to be moving, whatever happened. Even if things had been going well, I think I would have wanted to taste what else is out there.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so. Think so. I think people, if you're interested in history or interest in history and you'll read around the subject and you'll draw parallels with, I find, though, that things I've done in Ireland, they do inform me when I go somewhere else. I look at the history of other, but that's probably true of anyone. You look at what's relatable, something happens to you or you learn something about your history. something's happening in Iran. Oh, that's interesting. There's a kind of a parallel there. We compare things all the time, don't we?”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, it was shocking. I mean, I wasn't living there when it was happening. I was following things somewhat. You know, I've said it in one of the books. You know, 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, in some terrible. So when it all started falling, you know, it's like the truth comes out. You know, when the truth comes out, it can be like a house of cards. So I suppose that's why it might have been sudden. But I guess if you're living there and you're really observing this, it was probably being chipped away out and people were just, you know, they knew things. People knew things. And it was permissible now to speak up about it and talk about it. I mean, I think it's the church that's fallen. I wouldn't say religion is gone necessarily, but I think the church has really suffered.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one. Yeah. So the North hasn't done that, I think. Of course, people were going to college, but it wasn't a sort of, you know, it was a default almost for people in Ireland to go to college. There wasn't anywhere else to do. And do this. And 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.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not really. I don't think that's true. I mean, it's doing less well economically, that's for sure. I mean, Southern Ireland is booming. Southern Ireland has never industrialized. So in a way, we're catching up where, you know, we were never industrialized. The North was. We suffered terrible recessions and unemployment in the 80s. I mean, I left Ireland in the 80s during that time. It was a terrible time. And what do we do? We educated ourselves. So we became possibly among the most educated populations on earth in that time.”
2025-09-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source