Shame Every Rose: Images of Afghanistan Opens at the Poetry Foundation Gallery
Seamus Murphy’s photographs on exhibit until August 24, 2013
CHICAGO — Shame Every Rose: Images of Afghanistan, a photography exhibition currently on view at the Poetry Foundation gallery, 61 West Superior Street, displays the works of photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy and complements the June issue of Poetry magazine, “Landays.”
A form of oral folk poetry, landays—the term references a short, poisonous snake—are composed by and circulated among Pashtun women. Dense with emotion, these short, couplet-style poems are featured in the June issue of Poetry alongside Murphy’s images of Afghanistan.
Taken over a period of 18 years, the photographs in this exhibition are sequenced to suggest the form of a landay and are meant to be read (or viewed) from left to right. The exhibition is free and open to the public and will run until August 24, 2013.
In 2008 Seamus Murphy published A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan, which focused on the turbulent life of the Afghan people since 1994. His film of the same name was a 2012 Emmy Award nominee and received the 2012 Liberty in Media Prize, and his 2012 multimedia film Syrian Spring was nominated for a Prix Bayeux-Calvados for War Reporting. Murphy’s films include music videos for P.J. Harvey as well as an alternative view of the London Olympics for the New Yorker. In 2014, he will release a book of photographs focusing on the United States.
The June 2013 issue of Poetry was made possible by the generous support of the Pulitzer Center and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The Pulitzer Center will present “I Am the Beggar of the World,” a reading and film screening event, on July 30, 2013, at Culture Project in New York City and on Wednesday, July 31, 2013, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will release I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan in spring 2014.
The entire June 2013 issue is online. Digital copies of the June issue of Poetry magazine, as well as a digital subscription, are also available. The Pulitzer Center has more about the project.
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About Poetry Magazine
Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Monroe’s “Open Door” policy, set forth in Volume 1 of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry’s mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented—often for the first time—works by virtually every major contemporary poet.
About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.
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