The Republic begins with a quote from James Joyce: “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always ourselves.”
One can see how this might apply to a certain kind of observational photography that lingers between photojournalism and documentary. Rather than the single day during which Joyce’s Ulysses is set, the images in Murphy’s book were captured across Ireland in just over a year, between 2014 and 2015. They span portraiture, reportage, observation and landscape as Murphy attempts to take the pulse of contemporary Ireland just before the centenary of the Easter Rising, the turbulent moment in which the idea of the actual Irish Republic was born.
Though the idea for the book was born in Syria in 2012, when Murphy was “trekking silently for eight hours through regime-held villages under a blanket of darkness” with FSA rebels, it also owes its gestation to a single image that, as Murphy writes, “wouldn’t leave me alone”. That image is of a man seated backwards on a horse going over a tall hedge. It is, says Murphy, “a glimpse of the comedy we make of life, death and the rules in Ireland”. It could also serve as a metaphor for the management of the country during the financial carnage that followed of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy. Or a certain kind of paddywhackery that endures despite all that.
Murphy’s Ireland is both a strange and familiar place and it unfolds in a wilfully impressionistic fashion. An image of an elderly man having his hair sprayed at a barber’s in Ballymun, Dublin is emblematic of Murphy’s approach, being quietly humorous but also indicative of the changes that have come about of late in a society that, not that long ago, was masculine, conservative and, even in the capital, relatively parochial. A portrait of a group of students in evening dress at Trinity College Dublin is followed by a another of two women in saris cooking in their kitchen in Navan, Co Meath. There are several Irelands in this book and they coexist even if they are often relatively invisible to each other.
Here and there, Murphy sails close to the tropes of an older kind of photography about another Ireland: red-haired children, big skies, crowds at GAA matches and race meetings. But this Ireland endures too and, if anything, has grown stronger since the country’s late surge towards modernity. For me, his images work best when they steer clear of the overfamiliar for a more oblique and thus more suggestive approach: a trail of footprints in concrete rendered golden by streetlights or a group of young footballers huddled in a ring beneath the moonlight, the goalposts in the background stark against shadowy trees. Another Ireland is evoked, a still tentative place edging its way towards an uncertain future once again.
The Republic is published by Allen Lane (£25). Click here to order a copy for £20
