Interview by Luna Schaffitel - October 2019

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Seamus Murphy is an Irish photographer and filmmaker based in London. He is the recipient of seven World Press Photo awards, author of four books, and has collaborated with musician PJ Harvey on the movie A Dog Called Money.

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Your last movie, A Dog Called Money, is an artistic fusion of a music album of PJ Harvey and your work as a filmmaker and photographer.  How did this come about?

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One day in 2010, I got a call from Polly (PJ Harvey), she had seen my pictures of Afghanistan and was currently working on a music album about war called Let England Shake. She wanted to do an artistic collaboration so we met and decided that I would make a short film to each of her songs. That’s how it all started. After that, we decided to make a movie on her album The Hope Six Demolition Project, published in 2016. The idea was looking at a creative process through an artistic collaboration. I was going to do still and moving pictures, while she was going to write words that would become poems and songs. These songs would become an album, my pictures combined with her poems would become a book, and the movie A Dog called Money is about the whole thing. It’s not only a movie about the making of the album because it focuses a lot on its sources of inspiration. It’s investigating the

places, the people, and their stories that Polly turned into songs. 

 

Your movie is very fractured. How are the different stories connected to each other?

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I like to put things together that are a bit incongruent and make them fit together. You make the connection by choosing the connection. For some it might not be obvious. It’s never obvious, as poetry is never obvious. Someone said to me - and it’s true –

“Each section of your film could be a film in itself.”. I love that about photography because one picture tells so many stories. And then you move on to the next frame and the next sequence. I think that’s what makes it interesting and again, it’s like poetry. You have this line and you could think about it for the rest of your life, and then comes the next line, and so it carries on. If you think of the film, it lives in that space. What links them is the songs. In a way, I’m using the album as my narrative device.

 

“A Dog Called Money” – what’s the story behind this name?

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We decided to go to Washington DC. because we wanted to cover a place that is not from the outside world and is close to our culture. Also, DC is the center of Western power - Afghanistan and Kosovo are places that people in DC make laws about, invade, and “help”. DC, being the center of American power, could make you think that it must be very rich. Yeah, if you’re white and you live in a special area. But there is a lot of poverty and most of the people in DC are black. We went there knowing that we wanted to go to Anacostia, just five stops by metro from the White House, in order to cover this part of DC that no one ever talks about. And that’s where we met Pony, a 20-year-old black gang leader. She was sitting in the streets, playing cards with her friends. There was a dog nearby, it had its nails painted red. When Polly saw Pony for the first time, she was taking notes: “Pony. She has her crew. They play cards for dollars. They have a dog called money.”

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