Creative: The Hollow of the Hand

Thanks to my friend Larry for sending this baby my way. My new favorite photography book. You might know musician/poet PJ Harvey, but you might not know photographer Seamus Murphy, but you really, really should. She’s been killing it for years and so has he but for some reason you don’t hear much about him in the United States. From 2011 to 2014 the pair went on voyages to Kosovo, Afghanistan and even to Washington DC. The result was “The Hollow of the Hand.” There are many things I love about this book that reminds me in some ways of the redesigned Paris Review. The closest thing in Blurb terms would be a 5×8 trade with standard color paper.(Still very different.) This does not look or feel like a “photography book,” or your standard “I’m doing a monograph and want the largest possible trim size I can get.” This book is intimate, and I love everything about it. The ratio of poems to photographs is slanted heavily in favor of the imagery, but the poems are reflective of enough detail to make things interesting. The repro is beautiful. This book is also proof you can put key elements in the gutter and the world will not end! This is my favorite kind of book now. Something that makes me rethink what I know as normal. This is a book to add to the collection.