‘This is Paradise’: Ben Murphy’s The Riverbed

By Nigel Warburton

Ben Murphy’s Riverbed is a photographic record of the improvised living spaces of a diverse group of British settlers in a dried-up riverbed in Andalucia. Many of these are in Spain as a direct consequence of Margaret Thatcher’s hounding of what she dubbed ‘New Age Travellers’, though few would accept that label. Their caravans, vans, buses are surrounded by a revealing clutter of functional, decorative, and abandoned objects. The vehicles are gradually integrating into the natural environment, camouflaged with surrounding bamboo plants, orange trees and grass.

The inhabitants’ absence is unsettling. The images invite speculation about who could possibly live like this and why. If the fundamental philosophical question is ‘How should we live?’ what sort of person would choose this answer? As in Murphy’s earlier series of the United Nations Building in New York (published as a Thames and Hudson book in 2005), which was similarly devoid of people, the effect is disquieting. In the U.N series this foregrounds the architectural space and its embodied meanings - as Murphy wrote

‘I chose to photograph the interiors empty, because by concentrating on what is left behind in people’s absence one gains a better impression of what these spaces represent.’