What Does the Bereft Hand Offer?

The Hollow of the Hand
P.J. Harvey & Seamus Murphy
Bloomsbury
Oct 2015
$35.00

the_hollow_of_the_handBetween 2011 and 2014, critically acclaimed musician PJ Harvey and her friend, photographer and film-maker Seamus Murphy, set out on a series of journeys together to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington DC.

Harvey describes the modus operandi of her collaboration with Murphy: ‘I would collect words, he would collect pictures, following our instincts on where we should go’. The place names alone intimate the subject matter of the book to a global citizen familiar with a news cycle: wars, wars, wars. But it is the ordinary person that the pair is interested in, the landscape and the streets, human faces, as well as distant horizons: ‘I wanted to smell the air, feel the soil and meet the people of the countries I was fascinated with’.

Continue reading

  • You might also like

    • Today Will Always Be Tomorrow

      For those of you who were hurtling toward adulthood in the mid-90s listening to Blur’s The Great Escape over and over again, you may recall the quiet melancholy tune sandwiched between the poppier sounds of ‘It Could Be You’ and ‘Globe Alone’. It went a little something like this: “Ernold Same awoke … Continue reading