Seamus Murphy’s Strange Love brings together photographs made between 2005 and 2019 in the United States and Russia. Its subject is everyday life in places shaped by the experience of industrial decline, viewed across a political division that often dominates the way the two countries are discussed. The book directs attention toward working people and the similarities that can be obscured by familiar national narratives.

The sequence alternates between the United States and Russia. That repeated movement asks the reader to identify where an image was made, while also making the distinction less secure. The publisher presents this uncertainty as central to the project: photographs can unsettle assumptions about difference when the ordinary circumstances of people’s lives begin to look familiar across a border. The comparison develops through the arrangement of images, giving the book’s order an active part in its meaning.

Setanta Books published this first edition in 2025. The cloth hardback contains 192 pages and 88 images, with publisher dimensions of 300 by 220 millimetres. These specifications describe the book itself. The publisher also offers separate print editions, whose signed prints and limited quantities should be understood as additional products rather than features of every copy.

For a reader interested in documentary photography, the book offers a sustained comparison built around looking and reconsidering. Murphy’s attention to overlooked working lives gives the geopolitical theme a concrete scale. The photographs invite questions about what a national label explains, what it hides, and how readily a viewer assigns a place or identity to an unfamiliar scene.