Spencer Murphy Dirty Photos
Surf photography, move over. Dirty pics are now where it’s at.
After years photographing beautiful people like Kelly Slater and arresting beachscapes such as Malibu and Mundaka, Spencer Murphy’s turned his lens onto mankind’s ugliest by-product: trash. His new exhibition, aptly titled ‘Wastelands’, features a series of stunning photographs of landfills shot over the course of a whole year across England.
“I’ve found these places strangely attractive,” says Spencer. “They are very quiet and desolate. Photographers have always found beauty in desolate places.”
Influenced by American lensmen Joel Sternfeld and Gregory Crewdson, Spencer says that the early morning light was key to capturing the eerie beauty of waste: “What I tried to do was make it beautiful and otherwordly, ’cause these are places we don’t get to interact with in our everyday lives.”
The exhibition, comprised of twenty-two photos, is a powerful testament to the archaeology of modern man: pornography, CDs, broken glass, revolting smells and hungry rodents dance the funereal rhapsody of a civilisation that insists on flirting with its own demise.
“It was very post-apocalyptic,” says Spencer. “You look at a landfill site and there are all these kinds of codes to human life around the place. It’s like these were places left behind. It could well be a sampling of what the end of the world would look like. The strangest thing is it’s all collected in one place. You get a porn magazine next to a Tchaikovsky record – and there’s nowhere else you’d get that. I suppose if the end of the world did come, things like that would start merging together and you’d get these strange indicators left behind.”
To Spencer, landfills are beautiful metaphors for human existence: “When I look at it I see how we consume at a rate where we don’t particularly keep things for a very long time. You’re always replacing your TV sets. You’re always wanting, you’re never really satisfied with what you have and who you are.”
So as we careen towards irreversible climate change and an eventual global collapse, does Spencer’s work carry a powerful ecological message? “I’d lie if I said there wasn’t an environmental angle, but I didn’t want to go out there and be a preachy environmentalist. I think the photos would look very different if I went with that approach. I tried to go with a beautiful-photography angle in hopes that the environmental message would come through when people spent time with the photos.”
Job done, then.
You can see more of Spencer’s work online at www.spencermurphy.co.uk.
This story originally appeared in Huck #006.
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