All images © Spencer Murphy
Spencer Murphy’s name should ring a bell thanks to his editorial commissions which has seen his photography published in such places as The Guardian Weekend, Telegraph Magazine, New Statesman, and the FT Weekend. He has also been included in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize no less than five times!
Here though are extracts from a personal project, a delicate and visually understated series entitled The Abyss Gazes Into You. It offers a gentle and thoughtful glimpse of Murphy's use of the landscape as inspiration and as a means to discover something within him.
“These images are 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,” says Murphy.
“The sense, perhaps, of what it is to live a finite life in an infinite universe. They are pictures that, to me, hint at the unfathomable scale not only of the universe, but of life itself. They are instances in which, by accident or design, I have found myself staring once more into the abyss, and the abyss has momentarily returned my gaze.”
Lofty themes and grand claims, but does the work bear the weight of these words? Check out more from the series here and decide for yourselves. We are giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Born in 1978, Murphy grew up in the Kentish countryside and studied photography at University College Falmouth, graduating in 2002. Murphy now lives and works in London.