Wednesday, March 16, 2011

A poet with a camera


Seamus Murphy directed and produced the music videos for all 12 tracks of PJ Harvey's latest album, Let England Shake. Murphy, a British photographer known primarily for his work in war-torn countries like Afghanistan, filmed all of the clips in various areas of England using available light, combining still photos and documentary-like video footage. The shots are both quietly naturalistic and eerily incongruous—a skeleton on display in a museum, Harvey performing in a bare room, the ebb and flow of the ocean tide—and they serve to comment on Harvey's own quietly eerie ode to Sunny England.