A few months ago I was talking to the journalist and writer Anthony Loyd at a media event. He enthused about a photographer he had worked with in Afghanistan called Seamus Murphy, who I discovered a month or so later was having an exhibition at Asia House Gallery in London called A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan to accompany his book of the same name.
There is nothing quite like seeing images 'in the flesh' at a scale worthy of their status, and this exhibition did not disappoint. Spanning from 1997 to 2007, Murphy's black-and-white images portrayed a poetic landscape, at once both beautiful and harsh, alongside the people who live within it displaying all the scars of living within a war-torn and unforgiving country. Murphy's book is a treasure, but the exhibited images are truly something else; when the deep, proud eyes of an Afghan man holding his baby close to his face look down upon you in that quiet and dim exhibition space, you feel truly humbled.
