Lost in Publications

Paul Graham

I am currently in Brazil, working on my project and of course having a little vacation, that’s why it took a while for me to publish a new page on Lost on Publications. But finally here it is.

All the best,

Sören

Paul Graham was one of the photographers in the New British Colour movement, who introduced colour saturation to the documentary and conceptual photography.

He is also interested in the photobook as an art object in itself, and an author of various essays about photography. His essay “The Unreasonable Apple” and “Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult” can be read on his site.

Fortunately today, when I wanted to publish this site, Paul Graham won the “Hasselblad Award”, one of the world’s most prestigious and highly doped photography prices. It couldn’t be a better timing.

The jury Statement gives a good overview about the person Paul Graham:

“Paul Graham is one of the most brilliant photographers of his generation. During the course of his nearly 40-year career, he has presented an extremely focused body of work, at once perfectly coherent and never monotonous. In images both sensitive and subtly political, he makes tangible the insignificant traces of ´the spirit of the times` we do not normally see. With his keen awareness of the photographic medium, he has constantly developed innovative forms of working with all aspects of photography. This makes him a profound force for renewal of the deep photographic tradition of engagement with the world.”

You can see the entire page with all posts of Paul Graham’s work here on Lost in Publications.

Also check the Lost in Publication on Pinterest

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#Paul Graham #Lost in Publications

“A1 - The Great North Road” is Paul Graham first publication, which he self-published in 1983. The Great North Road is 400 Miles long and goes from London to Edinburgh. During the 1950s a new highway M1 was build and the businesses and people on the A1 were left alone. Paul Graham photographed Hotels, Cafés and Gassations on the side of the road, through which he looked for evidence of political instability in the landscape.

“A1-The Great North Road”, Grey Editions, 1983 © Paul Graham (pictures via SPBH)

“This was a groundbreaking book in Britain, taking new and radical influences from the US and grafting them in a unique and extraordinary way onto British subject matter and a British documentary tradition. A1 is a transitional book, one that in many ways is nostalgic for a pre-Thatcherite Britain of working people going about lives that hadn’t changed that much since the end of the war. Then of course it all changed, the book opens with Thatcher’s trademark blue flashing across a picture taken on the street in the city of London, and there are also intimations of impending unemployment and hardship in the book. The book is something of a minor masterpiece, the photographer’s self-confidence and boldness blaze from the pages. And it represents what Paul acknowledges as the spirit of new wave, the punk ethos that enabled young people to create things for themselves, on their own terms. Of course Paul was astute at mobilising the embryonic photographic culture in Britain at the time to support him. But that’s also part of his success!” - David Chandler (via SPBH)

“A1-The Great North Road” 1983 © Paul Graham

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#Paul Graham #A1 - The Great North Road

In the series “Troubled Land” from 1987, Paul Graham deals with the conflict in Northern Ireland, where he combines landscape photography with classical war photography, which was completely new at this time and opened doors for other photographers. In the pictures you see just by a closer look references of the war.

Troubled Land, Grey Editions, 1987 © Paul Graham

“At first sight [the photographs in A Troubled Land] seduce you into viewing them simply as landscapes which accounts for people’s desire to engage with them. But they’re booby-trapped and launch the viewer into another area altogether. They play off that particular kind of sentiment which (Britons) have for landscape—a position which engenders Constable-like fields and Turner-like skies—against sentiments associated with political allegiance, British and Irish. If you don’t delve any deeper, you might see only the flags, signs and graffiti. But these symbols should also be read within the context of the landscape in which they reside, the Union flag in the richest and most fertile lands, the Irish tricolour against the rockier and hillier ground. These different layers of reading within the photographs only come out slowly.” - Paul Graham (from Paul Graham: The Troubles by Paul Bonaventura)

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#Paul Graham #Troubled Land

In “New Europe”, Paul Graham made numerous trips through nine European countries between 1986-1992. He covered different traces of European history by capturing subtle signs of the past in the present.

Here you can see a short video of the book.

“New Europe” Cornerhouse/Photomuseum Winterthur, 2004 © Paul Graham

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#Paul Graham #New Europe

In the series “End of an Age” (1996-1998), Paul Graham captures the time between youthful excess and the emerging awareness of adult responsibilities.

“These two extremes combine so that we ricochet between reality and escape. The point is to speak about this duality - seeing the world shockingly clearly, with moments of brilliant intensity, then to snap to the opposite extreme, avoiding reality, running away and escaping.” - Paul Graham

“End of an Age”, 1996-98 © Paul Graham

Short essay about “End of an Age” by David Levi Strauss, Originally Published in ArtForum, March 2000 on ASX.

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#Paul Graham #End of an Age

Pittsburgh (Man cutting grass), 2004 from “a shimmer of possibility ” © Paul Graham/steidlMACK

“This picture is actually part of a sequence of photographs I took on the first evening of a two-and-a-half-year trip around America, starting in Pittsburgh in 2004. I was just travelling with no particular purpose, taking photos along the way. This was in the car park in front of the motel where I was staying, and there was this guy cutting the grass of an entire huge field with a very loud old push-mower.

A “great shot” is the antithesis of what this work is about. It’s about appreciating the flow of the moment, the rhythm and currents and eddies of life, rather than neatly packaging the world into perfectly formed little jewels.

He saw me and lifted his hand at one point, but he didn’t really care. So I kept on taking pictures, with the sun shining directly into the camera. (It’s lovely to do everything that Kodak tell you not to.)

In one image from this sequence, he is to the left, then he’s to the right, then he’s wiping his face with a cloth. Then this beautiful moment happened: the sun burst through and the rain came down, and all the raindrops were illuminated in the shaft of light. It was quite extraordinary.

I like this shot because, besides the obvious reason of its beauty, it confers a nobility on what the man is doing. He was working with dignity on this unbelievable task - and, with perseverance, he was probably going to get it done. Many moments are mundane and seem worthless, but they form and shape our lives. They are quite different from the Herculean labours and extraordinary moments that photographers are addicted to.” - Paul Graham (Paul Graham’s best shot on the guardian)

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#Paul Graham #a shimmer of possibility

Paul Graham’s “Films” is tribute to the defining material of 20th century creativity. While he was going thru his body of work for his retrospective book “Paul Graham”, he began to reflect upon the physical medium film.

“Films”, MACK, 2011 © Paul Graham

What first appears in his book “Films” to be abstract dots, are in fact just greatly enlarged images of the raw film emulsion of his past projects.

Like so often 5b4.blogspot.com made a great review about this book.

Fuji Fujicolor HR400, 400asa, Television Portraits, 1992 © Paul Graham

Kodak Vericolor Professional Type S, 160asa, A1 The Great North Road, 1982 © Paul Graham

Fuji Fujicolor Super HR400, 400asa, Beyond Caring, 1984 © Paul Graham

Agfa Agfacolor, XRS, 400asa, New Europe, 1989 © Paul Graham

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#Paul Graham #Films

"I’m very interested in what keeps this medium alive and moving forward, not just for myself but for the readers/viewers/public. We can all point out cases of rather dead, moribund photography, even sincere reportage photography, where however worthy the intentions of the photographer, however hard they have worked, they’re using a language that has essentially dried up and fails to reach people. If the images have become clichéd, it’s self-defeating."

The Knight’s Move - In Conversation with Paul Graham 2010 by Aaron Schuman on seesawmagazine.com

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#Paul Graham #Aaron Schuman

“Beyond Caring”, is a series of photographs of British Department of Health and Social Security offices. It was made between 1984 and 1985 in a time of high unemployment and shows in color photographs, the oppressive atmosphere in this offices. The book is now considered of the key works from Britain’s wave of “New Color” photography.

“Beyond Caring” was re-published by Errata Editions in 2011 and includes essays by David Chandler and Jeffrey Ladd.

Video interview with Paul Graham from the “Cruel +Tender, exhibition, Tate Modern, 2003”.

“Beyond Caring” © Paul Graham, Errata Editions, 2011

Crouched Man, DHSS waiting room, 1984 © Paul Graham

Queue, Paddington DHSS West London, 1985 © Paul Graham

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#Paul Graham #Beyond Caring

“In Umbra Res” (“in the shadow of it”), was released in 1990 and was the output of a Fellowship supported by the British National Museum of Photography in 1989 and 1990.

“In Umbra Res”, National Museum of Photography, 1990 © Paul Graham (pictures via: designforlife)

“”In Umbra Res” marks a turning point in Graham’s work, a watershed which the photographer himself identified in an interview from the mid-1990s: Photography is a medium with a unique and particular link to reality. Previously there was no problem about this, the world was out there, and you simply had to put your camera over your shoulder and go out with an open heart and head to observe this reality. This was the ‘old consciousness’ if you like. The problem is that over the past two decades our perception of reality has changed from something ‘out there’ to something ‘within us’, a blend of external, internal, past and present stimuli, personal and collective beliefs, mediated and original ideas… Troubled Land was the last group of photographs by Graham that dealt exclusively with the veneer of the visible world. With In Umbra Res, and the New Europe book to which it gave rise, the photographer argued for a more holistic, psychologically charged version of reality - fragmentary certainly, but one that takes account of everything we carry with us as intellectual and emotional beings….” - Paul Bonaventura (from Paul Graham: The Troubles by Paul Bonaventura)

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#Paul Graham #In Umbra Res

“Empty Heaven” published in 1995, is a collection of photographs examining contemporary Japanese society.

TJ Proechel made a great review about this book. Here you can also see a short video of “Empty Heaven”.

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#Paul Graham #Empty Heaven

“American Night” is a very conceptual and also social critique work about the plight of the African-American underclass in contemporary America, which was made between 1998 and 2002. In the work Paul Graham juxtaposes over-exposed with colour-saturated photographs.

“American Night is about the social fracture of America, but it’s also about the landscape of America, from the inner-city to the suburbs to the McMansions. So it’s about seeing and not seeing, about lightness and darkness, black and white and colour, about a state of mind - visibility and invisibility. When people come from a photographic point of view, they tend to lock in on the social-documentary aspect of it, which surprises me.” - Paul Graham

“The first overexposed one was an accident. when I had the print of that, I just left it on the table, gradually looked at it more and more, and realized that it was in fact interesting. Then I started trying to figure out how could I get this effect intentionally – I could overexpose in the camera and maintain it, because I do my own processing. I suffer from the same amount of laziness and procrastination as anyone else, and I remember when I was working in Memphis once I went to a movie in the afternoon. When I came out of the movie into sunlight, my vision was burnt out; there was this blazing afternoon sunshine and I couldn’t see anything, and I realized how much that darkroom accident mimicked this optical burnout, which was about invisibility, and just beginning to perceive things.” - Paul Graham

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#Paul Graham #American Night

I am a big fan of Paul Graham’s “A Shimmer of Possibility”, which was published in 2007 by steidlMACK, 2007. It contains 12 individual books, each a visual short story, which capture the often overlooked poetry of everyday life in the United States. The second edition brings together the 12 books in one single volume at an accessible price.

About his approach Paul Graham said, “I am interested in more elusive and nebulous subject matter. The photography I most respect pulls something out of the ether of nothingness… you can’t sum up the results in a single line. In a way, ‘a shimmer of possibility’ is really about these nothing moments in life.”

“I relaxed and recognized that it’s about the moment-before and the moment-after, as much as it’s about the ‘decisive moment’. In shimmer, there’s a series where I’m walking behind two people carrying some boxes of Pepsi on their shoulder, and then the attention flips to a couple waiting at a bus-stop. We just all happened to walk passed them, so I took a picture, then I went back to the walk and the guy carrying the Pepsi. A moment later we passed a little boy playing in his garden, trying to use a plastic bag as a kite. So I took a picture of that, and then returned to the guy with the Pepsi again.” - Paul Graham

To get more insight into ”A Shimmer of Possibility” I highly recommend the article on ASX and the really nicely written book review at 5b4.blogspot.com.

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#Paul Graham #A Shimmer of Possibility

The latest book of Paul Graham, “The Present” comes out in April 2012 by MACK and is the third in Paul Graham’s trilogy of projects on America which began with “American Night” in 2003 and was followed in 2007 by “a shimmer of possibility”.

Paul Graham shows a glimpse of a continuum: before/after, coming/going, either/or. A “present” that is a fleeting and provisional alignment.

“You don’t need a multiplicity of images. You show what happens, then what happens next. And so you shift your focus.” - Paul Graham

Even though the book isn’t out yet, the Exhibition opened already at the “Pace Gallery” in New York and the first reviews are out. I recommend the review by DLK Collection as well LPV Magazine to get a better insight about “The Present”.

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#Paul Graham #The Present