poetryfoundation:“These pictures are all squares, taken on an...

Photo by Seamus Murphy/Panos Pictures.


Photo by Seamus Murphy/Panos Pictures.


Photo by Seamus Murphy/Panos Pictures.


Photo by Seamus Murphy/Panos Pictures.


Photo by Seamus Murphy/Panos Pictures.


Photo by Seamus Murphy/Panos Pictures.


Photo by Seamus Murphy/Panos Pictures.


Photo by Seamus Murphy/Panos Pictures.


Photo by Seamus Murphy/Panos Pictures.


Photo by Seamus Murphy/Panos Pictures.

poetryfoundation:

“These pictures are all squares, taken on an old Rolleiflex film 
camera — I am guessing fifties vintage — that produces a square-shaped image two and a quarter inches, or six centimeters all around. It lacks the porous elasticity of the lithe, more common rectangular format. Tension is created by this formality and bounces around within the frame. For me, the square was like using an alien vernacular; dealing with extra space which shouldn’t be there and a lack of space where it should be. I shot them as part of a wider project on Ireland that became the book The Republic (2016), an exile’s look at Ireland one hundred years after her revolutionary Easter Rising of 1916.” —Seamus Murphy, “Two and a Quarter” (Poetry, October 2017)