Across her four minute video for “The Wheel,” PJ Harvey has around 30 seconds of screen time, and those fleeting moments seem only to remind the viewer they aren’t mistakenly watching NatGeo.
The bulk of the video is footage of life in Kosovo shot by Seamus Murphy, a photographer who has been taking photos of Kosovo and Afghan people since 1994.
Harvey steps back and allows the people of Kosovo to tell their own story through short snapshots of life in Kosovo and Afghanistan.
“When I’m writing a song I visualize the entire scene,” Harvey said in a statement. “I can see the colors, I can tell the time of day, I can sense the mood, I can see the light changing, the shadows moving, everything in that picture. Gathering information from secondary sources felt too far removed for what I was trying to write about. I wanted to smell the air, feel the soil and meet the people of the countries I was fascinated with.”