Seamus Murphy: belief

Transcript context

…Is that misleading in some way? Misleading? No, I don’t think so. In the picture, she’s looking pretty terrified. The thing, of course, you’ve got to remember about photography — that photograph was probably taken in a fraction of a second. Two minutes before that, she might have been smiling, and two minutes later, she might have been crying. It’s a process. The person takes the photograph, the photograph gets disseminated. It was used, I think on the cover of National Geographic. They had a much wider story on what was going on in Afghanistan. If you read the story, you’d be filled in on what was going on. It was a very striking moment of the kind of fear, I think, that you could imagine a girl like that having. Whether she was afraid at the time, I don’t know. Maybe she was frightened of the camera. Maybe she was frightened of this white guy taking a photograph. I just don’t know. I think it also captured the beauty of that girl. That’s another thing about Afghanistan, people are absolutely beautiful. They’re very striking, and I think that’s important to see that side of it. Now, in one of your books on Afghanistan called I Am the Beggar of This World, you mentioned that Pashtun women are not supposed to show love and romance, even when they’re getting married. Why is that?…

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