New Delhi, Aug. 25 -- Award-winning Irish photographer Seamus Murphy brings three decades of looking, listening and observing to Museo Camera in Gurugram.
There are places we learn about through news headlines: war in Afghanistan, the politics and history of Ireland, the pageantry, myth and faded grandeur of Kolkata. Irish photographer Seamus Murphy has spent much of his career looking beyond those familiar narratives.
His photographs are less interested in the event than in the people living through it; less concerned with spectacle than with the quiet details that reveal how people inhabit a place. It is this deeply human approach that runs through 'Life is in Many Days', a major exhibition of Murphy's work currently on view at Museo Camera, Gurugram, from August 22 to October 25. The exhibition is assembled by renowned curator and editor Zelda Cheatle.
Bringing together four major bodies of work made over more than three decades across Afghanistan, Ireland, India, Russia and the United States, the exhibition offers a portrait of a photographer constantly searching for intimacy within the complexity of everyday life. "I'm always striving for intimacy and a certain kind of poetic realism," Murphy says. That idea is perhaps the thread that connects the very different worlds in his photographs.
His long relationship with Afghanistan began in 1994. Murphy has developed an understanding of a country that goes well beyond the conventions of war photography. His images acknowledge conflict without allowing it to define the people he photographs. In faces, gestures, streets and moments of ordinary life, he finds dignity, humour and resilience.
Ireland, too, appears through a more personal lens in 'The Republic'. Made after a period away from his homeland, the series moves beyond the familiar political and cultural narratives associated with Ireland. Murphy instead turns his camera towards rituals, memories, humour and fleeting encounters, creating a portrait of contemporary Irish life that feels intimate rather than definitive.
His more recent work in India takes him to Kolkata. Like the Dublin of James Joyce's 'Ulysses', from which the exhibition borrows its title, Murphy photographs Kolkata not as a spectacle but as a living, constantly shifting landscape. Spirituality, work, architecture, movement and everyday conversation collide and coexist in its streets.
Amit Chaudhuri, whose relationship with Kolkata gives him a particularly intimate understanding of the city, sees something distinctive in Murphy's photographs. He describes the camera as uncovering a 'calm, deeply moving formalism' in a city that is 'constantly coming apart, breaking away and remaking itself'. There is also a connection to the city's artistic past.
Chaudhuri sees Murphy's photographs echoing Kolkata's long history of visual design - its cabs, saris, signboards and typefaces - while simultaneously discovering new forms in the texture of its present. "It's as if Calcutta, unaware of itself as anything but terrain and habitation, continues to create, inadvertently, new fields of line, movement and colour," Chaudhuri writes. That observation captures something essential about Murphy's lens and his literary influences. He doesn't seem to impose a story on a place, but rather a narrative is revealed.
This same sensibility informs 'Strange Love', Murphy's recent book, which brings together photographs from Russia and the United States. Two countries frequently presented as opposites, even natural enemies, are juxtaposed through the lives of ordinary people. Political power remains a backdrop. What we see are the shared experiences of hope, hardship, work and uncertainty.
Across his work, Murphy's camera repeatedly returns to the same fundamental subject: people and the worlds they make around themselves - the universality of the local.
'Life is in Many Days' is therefore not simply an exhibition about Afghanistan, Ireland, Kolkata, Russia or America. It is an exhibition about a way of seeing and about what becomes visible when a photographer takes the time to look beyond the obvious. These images invite the viewer to pause, to notice a gesture, a face, a fragment of architecture, a moment of humour or a particular quality of light. And in those seemingly small details, they find something larger: the shared texture of human life.
Curated by Zelda Cheatle, 'Life is in Many Days' is on view at Museo Camera, Gurugram, from August 22 to October 25, 2026
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.