The Republic by Seamus Murphy review a nation of many parts

Seamus Murphy’s pictures of Ireland, ranging from the beautiful to the everyday and absurd, evoke a modern country that feels both strange and familiar

The Republic begins with a quote from James Joyce: “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always ourselves.”

One can see how this might apply to a certain kind of observational photography that lingers between photojournalism and documentary. Rather than the single day during which Joyce’s Ulysses is set, the images in Murphy’s book were captured across Ireland in just over a year, between 2014 and 2015. They span portraiture, reportage, observation and landscape as Murphy attempts to take the pulse of contemporary Ireland just before the centenary of the Easter Rising, the turbulent moment in which the idea of the actual Irish Republic was born.

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