Inspired from an early age by Life and National Geographic magazines, Murphy provides us with a unique offering in the world of portrait photography.
His work includes portraits of Peter Crouch , Benedict Cumberbatch and most recently a Guardian Weekend editorial on JK Rowling. However it is his portrait of Mark Rylance that hits you when you pay a visit to his website - a stunning portrait that has been nominated for the Taylor Wessing Prize and is currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery.
Very often his subjects are not looking into the camera, there is very little eye contact with the photographer or indeed anyone as they look to be just staring into space rather than at something or someone in particular. This gives an almost dreamy look to his images - his subjects appear to be lost in their own thoughts, their own preoccupations. It is like we are allowed to see share this intimate moment with them.
This is especially so in his project titled The Abyss Gazes into you where he writes about photographs he has taken where he has 'recognised a reflection of something inside myself - a feeling of both being trapped and floating endlessly in time and space, a mixture of hope and despair, desolation and beauty. The sense, perhaps, of what it is to live a finite life in an infinite universe'.
Expressions are serious, stern almost, they give nothing away. They invite the viewer to wonder what they are seeing, thinking or contemplating doing.
His most recent project where he teamed up Save the Children centred on what poverty meant to children in East London. This Kind of Poverty gives little away too about the children or what they are thinking. They look serious, unhappy and pensive. The words (the childrens) that accompany the images gives us the only insight into their thoughts and feelings.
Throughout his portrait work there is a strong emphasis on the eyes. They are colour enhanced, with strong catchlights and are often open wide and staring.
His images of today's big icons from film, literature and popular culture brings his subjects to a human and familiar level.
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