Where the United States and Russia are more similar than one thinks

In the foreword to his book “Strange Love”, the renowned Irish photo journalist Seamus Murphy tells two key experiences from his childhood in Ireland. The first: in 1963, Murphy sitting on his father’s shoulder as a three-year-old when US President John F. Kennedy waves to the Dubliners when he visited Ireland. “He was our star, a son of Ireland.” A few months later. Murphy’s mother cried, his father swore to never go to America, “where they produced gods, only to then destroy them”.

The second experience: Murphy is ten years old when a teacher frightens the children with horror stories about the communist Russia and its historical cleansing of the churches. “We had to pray for the persecuted in the Soviet Union,” recalls the photographer, “and we were told that the USA was strong and good.”

This old, familiar worldview earthed us all – for decades. Well, with the second taking office of US President Trump, it is over with her. There was confusion: Who is the new enemy who is still a friend and partner?

Seamus Murphy experienced this feeling of geopolitical uncertainty years before. During visits to the Russian province, he found landscapes and scenes that resembled the sadness of the so -called American rust belt from Pennsylvania to Michigan.

In pictures of trips through Russia and the USA between 2006 and 2019, Murphy brings the reader the strange feeling of déjà-vu, which he felt again and again on site. Sure, today some pothole may be stuffed, some facades be renovated; What remains is the everyday melancholy of these photos, in which the United States and Russia look surprisingly similar.

When looking at your pictures, you quickly lose your orientation: is that still pennsylvania or already Perm? “The cold war was based on the apparent gap between these two giants and their opposing ideologies,” says Murphy. “Today, the industrial decline of both powers and their transfigured look at a mythologized past cannot be overlooked.”