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 ›All and Everyone
on 27 November 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!
'All And Everyone' is the longest track on the album. Dark, formal
and auspicious. It starts with epic gravitas and grandeur building
to a controlled and inevitable finale, like death itself. The
care-free sing-along of the refrain: "As we advancing, in the sun,
singing death to all and everyone" is like soldiers meeting their
end with a tune in their heads, buoyed by love of each other and
accepting their lot with a jeer. Its slowed-down delivery extends
time like slow motion, a deliberate heightening of mortal last
moments. It demands reac¬tion and makes me think how cursory is the
nature of killing and being killed during war, making it all the
more worthless. It was the film I most looked forward to making,
and most dreaded. I found a clue to it in Essex at Old Leigh, a
place recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 and where the River
Thames meets the sea. The film starts out with some imagery from
Norfolk. With the ominous change in the music comes a day of
brilliant morning sunshine under the pier at Southend. Later in the
day the weather turned filthy, becoming a snow blizzard and I had
to spend an unplanned second night in Southend. The next morning a
few miles along the coast towards London, heavy snows forced me to
stop driving and I pulled in at Old Leigh. I got bored stuck in the
car and headed for the seashore. The tide was out and ropes and
chains of fishing boats and other craft at anchor were being
covered with wet snow, the scene resembled an art-directed
battlefield in the grey light. I got soaked shooting this but it
was better than listening to people on the radio going on endlessly
on about local councils failing to grit their roads. Where was the
Dunkirk spirit? After a while I turned around and was dumb-struck
by red roses delicately placed in chains on the jetty wall.
Discreet enough to miss if you weren't on the shore looking back or
in a boat. Were they put there for a particular victim, a memorial
to all drowned fishermen, or an expression of doomed romantic love?
This line of flowers, with the changing direction and speed of the
falling snow gave me something to start working with to approach
'All And Everyone'. I thank the snow for making me stop. The final
sequence with the boat being launched and scudding across the sea
was shot looking down over Chesil Cove in Dorset. I often had the
languid saxophone that ends the track in my head when shooting
lengthy sequences. My fear when shooting it was the boat would stop
too long or fall out of the bottom of the frame before exiting the
frame on left. It slimly made it. I loved the sea, the scale, the
gathering gulls following the vessel, that it goes on that little
bit too long and the tiny patch of land that is forever
England.
PJ Harvey Web Site
England Photo Essay by Seamus Murphy