Strange Love,
Gallery 46,
46 Ashfield St,
London,
E1 2AJ,
October,
@gallery46whitechapel.
With his book Strange Love, Seamus Murphy challenges the conventional narrative of East versus West, offering a striking visual exploration of life in post-industrial America and Russia.
Strange Love serves as a timely reflection on the fragile, sometimes indistinguishable line separating the two countries. While the powerful engage in high-stakes political games, the book focuses on the overlooked lives of those who always pay the price. Murphy had been covering the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and he was interested, in part, in the militarised residue of the Bush years. It struck him as profoundly interesting; early evidence, perhaps, of something like a new world order.
There was also evidence everywhere he looked that those Russian extremes – of oligarchs and poverty and authoritarian government – were taking hold in the United States. In the years in which he had been pursuing this project, both of the powers continued to wage wars across the globe – Russia, of course, in Ukraine. In both countries citizens were similarly alienated from distant government, and often similarly desperate.
Strange Love challenges viewers’ assumptions by presenting an equal number of images of the two countries, which often prove difficult to distinguish one from the other. Which leads to a reasonable, some may say contentious, question for our times; if it’s tricky to tell the difference, what is the difference?
“I’m not trying to make any equivalence politically,” Murphy says of the photos, “of course not. I just wanted to show that at the level of ordinary working people, everyday life is not so different; working Joes always get the worst of it.”
