Welcome to Putin’s Russia… or is it Trump’s United States?

A car navigates the potholes of Irkutsk after heavy rain.

Not long after documenting America’s post-industrial Rust belt, photographer Seamus Murphy was asked to explore the ‘new Russia’. What surprised him most was not the stark differences but the visual similarities

Photographs by Seamus Murphy

Words by Tim Adams

The pictures on these pages ask questions about preconception. Half were taken in the US, and half in Russia. They alternate, and might make you think hard about which comes from where.

They come from a new book by the photographer Seamus Murphy, called Strange Love. The book began, Murphy recalls, way back in 2007, when he was thinking of doing a tour across the US to mark the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Murphy, who’d made his name as a photojournalist on the frontline of conflicts across the world, had been wondering about doing a photographic odyssey in the States for some years.

Using Kerouac’s journey as a rough guide, he started making a few trips with his camera, mostly in the post-industrial Rust belt cities, and further south. He had been covering the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and he was interested, in part, in the militarised residue of the Bush years.

Pennsylvania became hometo many Slavic immigrants.

A young couple by the Angara river in Irkutsk.

Barbecue by a power plant on the Yazva river in Perm.

As luck would have it, not long after he embarked on that quest, Murphy got a commission from Newsweek to go to Russia on a similar kind of venture – six weeks travelling alone without an interpreter, looking at Putin’s “new Russia”. He had the recent American images in his head, and he was struck, he remembers, not by the stark differences in the urban landscape and the circumstances of the people of the two former cold war superpowers, but by the visual similarities. When he went back through files and contact sheets of images, it was sometimes hard to tell one nation from the other.

That thought struck Murphy as profoundly interesting; as early evidence, perhaps, of something like a new world order. As a boy growing up in Dublin in the 1960s he’d been, along with almost everyone else on the planet, indoctrinated with the idea that the two nations represented the ultimate either/or of geopolitics. He’d sat on his dad’s shoulders in 1963 to see President Kennedy’s motorcade pass through Dublin on a four-day trip to Ireland. A deep emotional bond with all things American was formed in Murphy’s mind, and strengthened by the horror of the assassination of “Ireland’s president” a few months later.

'I found the same feelings of pride and remorse etched into the lives of working people'

At school, he recalls, the binary of the world was further cemented by “a young teacher terrifying us by reading aloud from a paperback about Communist Russia and its historical purges of the [Orthodox] church”. He was instructed to pray for the persecuted Christians in the Soviet Union; he was told that the US was strong and good, and that Russia wanted to dominate the world. “Nothing could have been simpler or easier to digest.”

Murphy worked on other projects after those initial trips photographing the two countries, but he kept coming back to the idea.

“In 2015 Trump was coming,” he says. “I covered a couple of his campaigns and even then he was making all these nice noises about Putin. Thinking I had to finally get this done, I went back to Russia in 2017 and 2019, travelling in the Urals, which would be an equivalent in terms of industry to, say, Pennsylvania.”

Garden by the steel mill in Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Flocking to a petrol station in Tipton, California.

In Russia, on those trips, he says he “found the same textures and feelings of pride and remorse etched into the lives of working people” that he had been seeing in the States.

“I found distinct echoes,” he writes in his book, “of the same patriotism in Pennsylvania [and] the Urals, where military heritage and arms manufacture is traditionally allied to industrial security… there were similarities of scale, a sense of national dominion, belief in being at the centre of everything.”

There was also evidence everywhere he looked that those Russian extremes – of oligarchs and poverty and authoritarian government – were taking hold in the States. In the years in which he has been pursuing this project, he notes, both of the powers have continued to wage wars across the globe – Russia, of course, most terribly, in Ukraine. In both countries citizens were similarly alienated from distant government, and often similarly desperate.

“I’m not trying to make any equivalence politically,” he says of the pictures, “of course not. I just wanted to show that at the level of ordinary working people, everyday life is not so different; working Joes always get the worst of it.”