People. Not Pages: Patrick Murphy
With the “People. Not Pages” mini-interview series The Phooks invites you to learn more about people who stand behind the medium of self- & indie-published photobooks, and zines.
Today we talk to Patrick Murphy, a lifelong photographer, enthusiastically following his passion since childhood till now.
Patrick has never been a professional photographer, and photography wasn’t his only occupation, which didn’t stop him from being published and exhibited in Europe and the U.S.
He lives in Lithuania, spent about twenty years in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia, and traveled a lot, but his recently published and only photo book so far is dedicated to the South of the U.S.
“Reserved. Mr. Memory” represents the photographs Patrick made over a period of fifty years. In the book he writes: “the oldest of them when I was barely a teenager, the most recent, less than two years ago”. A truly lifetime personal documentary project.
Let’s head to the interview.
How do you live and make your living?
I am retired from full-time jobs. I do some translation and editing.
How did you get into photography?
When I was 11, I took photos with a plastic box camera on family trips.
A neighbor saw the photos and said if I was going to take photos, I should use a real camera. So he gave me an old German rangefinder with a Schneider 50mm f/2 lens and Compur shutter and taught me to develop and print black and white. I took an instant liking to it, and have never stopped making photos.
Photography was never my profession, although in the pre-internet era I had a fair number of photos published in various U.S. and European magazines and newspapers (e.g., Chicago Sun-Times, Time magazine, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, etc.).
I also did a lot of event photography and the odd wedding. But I always had a “desk job” other than as a photographer. At times when I seemed stuck behind a desk in a boring office bureaucracy, I kicked myself for not having become a ‘real’ photographer, but some of those jobs involved a lot of travel, and I was able to take photos while on business trips.
What do you value most in the art of photography?
That it works wordlessly.
I also like how the practice of photography embodies a paradox about time. The photos in my book were made over a period of literally 50 years, from when I was a kid with my first SLR, until rather recently (for a couple of them, which are digital).
But, if you consider that the average exposure of a photo is 1/60 sec. or shorter, then the 62 photos in my book represent only 1 second of my life.
“Which is it, 50 years or 1 second? It’s both.”
Is there something you hate about it?
I sort of hate how photography has been devalued through a process of image inflation — so many images are issued now that each one loses value — a sort of photographic Gresham’s law.
I liked it decades ago when practically the only new photos I saw in a given month were in the weekly issues of Life magazine, a few in the daily newspaper, and those in the latest monthly issue of National Geographic. When there were fewer photos in circulation, it was easier to appreciate a given photo.
How many photobooks do you have, and what does your collection mean to you?
Not really that many.
And there are not many of my photobooks that I consider irreplaceable.
Mainly, they are reminders of exhibitions I attended, in Paris, New York, Washington, Moscow, Amsterdam, Vilnius, elsewhere: Peter Beard, Araki, Salgado, Cartier-Bresson, Rodchenko, others.
Is there a photobook you admire? And why?
The book Winterreise by Luc Delahaye is one of my favorites. It contains photos made in post-Soviet Russia, mainly Siberia and the Urals. I spent 20 years in the Soviet Union and Russia and can appreciate what Delahaye was able to do.
Another of my favorite photobooks is Austerlitz, by the late W.G. Sebald. It is not a conventional photobook; it is a work of prose by one of the great authors of the late 20th/early 21st century, which contains some black and white photographs.
Sebald’s use of photos in combination with text was absolutely original, in my view. He also did it in several of his other books.
What should a book have to get into your collection?
It should be given to me in person, preferably by its maker; or, be available for sale and strike my fancy at a time when I have means of payment on me and can physically carry it.
What does it mean to turn your work into a book form? Tell us based on your latest project.
My only photo book so far, Reserved Mr. Memory, was self-published last year in Vilnius.
For over 18 years, I had lived in Russia without access to most of my photo archives. After I moved to Lithuania in 2012, I began to get reunited with my photo archives, bit by bit. After having had a few exhibitions in Lithuania, I decided to bring together photos taken in the region of the U.S. where I was born and make a book. I worked with an experienced photobook designer and an excellent pre-press expert. The text I wrote, although not long, is an integral part of the book.
What do you expect people should feel when opening your book.
It is enough that they be curious.
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