The Hollow of the Hand
PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy
Royal Festival Hall, London SE1
4/5

Dominating the stage at the Royal Festival Hall is an extraordinary monochrome image of a ceiling hung with flames. Shot by photojournalist Seamus Murphy from the outside of a home in Kosovo, it is an image with eloquence, setting the tone for the evening ahead as the audience take their seats.

Launching The Hollow of the Hand, a publication of poems by renowned singer-songwriter PJ Harvey together with photographs by Murphy, this special event as part of the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival sees the stage tentatively divided into three. To the right, a lectern ready for spotlighted poetry recitals; centre stage, musical instruments to perform new material and, to the far right, two seats set for dialogue and narration.

Likewise, the evening itself consists of three parts, moving across continents from Kosovo to Kabul and finally to Washington DC.

Journalist and poet Eliza Griswold is the host for this evening, introducing Murphy as a “photographer’s photographer” to which he appears sensibly unmoved given the complex subject matter of his documentation. Tonight, his penetrating short film is premiered — part of a longer documentary to be released with Harvey’s new album in 2016. This is a continuing collaboration between the two artists, building on Murphy’s series of films that accompanied Harvey’s former LP Let England Shake.

Throughout the evening, Griswold and Murphy discuss a remarkable portfolio of images shared with the audience that, at times, have the ability to draw out the humour in the haunting — one in particular where a young boy wearing a single roller-skate pauses to watch smoke rising from a block of apartments in Kosovo. “My photographs are not exclamation marks,” Murphy explains, “they are question marks.”

It is clear that the majority of the audience are here for a preview of Harvey’s new material, and perhaps not enough time is given to context. Harvey’s songs, many containing raw and repetitive riffs, do well to match the integrity of Murphy’s photographs. “That’s what they want,” she croons over and again during The Ministry of Social Affairs, written in response to Murphy’s image of an Afghan government building shelled in US air strikes.

The evening is punctuated with Harvey’s poems. Her delivery is strong and holds the auditorium well, but it’s difficult to avoid the feeling that her words would have more impact set to music.

During the final section of the evening, the focus switches from war-torn regions to the capital city of Washington DC, revealing a day-to-day conflict within the United States itself. It is the final song River Anacostia, with its stirring refrain “what will become of us all?” which brings a closing coherence to the evening that is deeply poignant.

Review by Angel Dahouk