About Joe Murphy

Before Joe Murphy ever pointed a camera at a soybean field, he was chasing newsroom deadlines as a photojournalist, covering politics, sports and breaking news. His work has appeared through The Associated Press, United Press International, Getty Images, The New York Times and National Geographic Television. That newsroom instinct — pay attention, tell the truth, get out of the way of the story — never left him.

A University of Iowa graduate, Murphy has spent more than three decades behind the camera, photographing subjects as different as sitting presidents and strangers in the alleyways of Morocco. His documentary work spans five continents and 18 countries, shot on film and digitally, in moments both weighty and quietly playful.

For the past 25 years, that same instinct has found its deepest expression in agriculture — barns, combines and kitchen tables across the United States, telling the stories of the people who grow what the rest of us eat. It's work that now anchors his client relationships and shapes most of what he shoots in a given year.

But agriculture was never the whole story. Murphy's galleries hold portraits of strangers met along the road, travel work from Asia, South America and Europe, and frames he shot because he couldn't help himself, not because a client asked for them. He also writes Puckerbrush Dispatch, a Substack newsletter about the people behind your next meal, the craft of photography, and the slices of life he finds along the way — proof, he'd say, that the photography and the storytelling were never two separate jobs.

Murphy operates as Light Shaping Photography and Communications, based in the Des Moines, Iowa area, and publishes under three bylines — Joe Murphy, Joseph L. Murphy and jmurphpix — depending on where the work runs.

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