“Photography lacks intentionality." | Photographer Paul Graham | Louisiana Channel

[Music] i always feel like i have an artistic collaborator and it is the world the photography i've loved has had this dance with life you've got this partner who you are waltzing with and you're trying to see where they're going and how they're doing it and it's your job to follow their lead rather than the other way around i was studying at university i was training as a scientist a microbiologist you know about viruses and cancer and bacteria and so on but i was always looking for some creative outlet in my life you know some direction some way of expressing that wish and unfortunately you know at school certainly in england that time you were if you were good at biology and chemistry and physics they timetabled you to do that and you couldn't do art or painting because that was at the same time as chemistry so you wouldn't you couldn't do those two you couldn't cross over so the minute i got to university i started you know going to night school to study art so i was doing my degree in the daytime in night school studying painting printmaking and i knew about photography the basics of it from being in the boy scouts i had a scoutmaster who was the classic um pedophiliac scout master who wanted to use his photography to photograph the boys and he would let me in the camera and i so i knew about how that but i didn't know that you could say something with photography you could actually make you know artworks or artworks on the wall or photographic literature and book form and when i discovered that it was like a light bulb going on like whoa you can you can communicate with this you can express yourself so there's a little section the university library called american studies which is there for the anthropologists really and it had walker evans and lee friedlander and paul strand arbus some music modern art books very small just like 20 books if you looked at the photography magazines at that time the general public photography magazines you thought you had to make a picture of a beautiful sunset or your car looking great or a girl in a bikini or whatever it was you know and this is a long time ago and you you never would see uh a challenging picture of of uh someone trying to articulate the the forces that move and shape our lives the social condition of our lives so when i saw that that you know that was possible um through those books and there was one magazine called creative camera which sounds terrible but actually it was a brilliant really serious art photography magazine in the uk it lasted for 25 years and it had portfolios by everyone by issues on arbus frank eggleston um british drugs like chris killet barton parr um had a letter from robert frank every other month he'd write a sort of editorial piece for them opinion piece and that was a fantastic education you know for me i looked at this work and i felt i get this i understand it in my stomach you know and even though i couldn't articulate it i didn't have the words didn't have the language didn't have the art education and still don't i felt this empathic understanding for what they were doing and how they were struggling to do it and therefore maybe possibly i could do something some imitation of that [Music] the united kingdom was going through a great time of change it was dragging itself out of mid 20th century mindset it had you know which was connected with the war with victory with there we used to be an industrial power a global power and an industrial power that had faded the industry was collapsing the steel industry the coal mines were shutting down thatcher was determined to railroad it through you know to run through and and change the whole dynamic of the uk of especially of britain at that time and um she was a great disciple of uh american economists of course there was reagan in america at the time and she sort of tried to outdo them and sold off everything that wasn't nailed down um from you know the buses the railways the coal mines steel wheels sold sold sold privatization that's the buzz phrase the government shouldn't hold all these things at the same time it's the time of punk late 70s so people knew it people were like despondent but out of that gloom and depression bloomed this wonderful you know quite liberating musical movement from the you know because england had a underclass a creative underclass who only future was out through mostly through music at that time and so that blossomed incredibly well and those attitudes spilled over you know into other art forms that was you know punk music which is the music everyone knows but there was also a very much a go it yourself ethos i had friends who were recording songs in their garages putting making up making up 500 copies or a thousand copies selling them themselves and i learned to do that with my own photography no one's going to print a paul graham book nobody's heard of me i'd do it myself i'll find a way to do it and make it happen and did [Music] the a1 project i did it in 81 and 82 mostly it follows one road the a1 the great north road which is not a motorway it's actually an old arterial road an old trunk road they call them in england it follows that up from where it starts right by the bank of england in the very center of the city of london the financial capital goes up through north london through the through the various counties of england to around the industrial north newcastle upon tyne crosses the border into scotland finishes in edinburgh right by the princess street post office in the heart of edinburgh ii so it connected to the capital of london with the capital of scotland it was the the principal to the north-south route of the nation until they built the motorways which was an interesting metaphor for england because it was one of the principal powers and then a faster more efficient way came along and this road started to slightly fade from its glory days which i liked as a a broad brush metaphor for the uk and its power waning so i made various journeys up and down it and photographed everything i could see along the way i wanted to keep it as open as possible i was working colour i should add that then which was unusual at that point because britain was dominated the tradition of social documentary engaged social documentary photography was black and white to the core and so inadvertently it challenged that by working in color i didn't want it to become just a set of portraits so just a set of landscapes or just a set of interiors so i wanted to be free to photograph a still life the sky the sea that i passed by a rainy day a sunny day i wanted to embrace it all i don't think i really succeeded but i got some of the way there and and not to define my photography by one single genre within it [Music] it has become a portrait of the time it's still alive it feels timely obviously the people's hairstyles the cars the colors they have changed things you never know you never realize or think are going to position something historically the colors of the cars they were not metallic cars then and suddenly there they all are and you realize now they're metallic cars and it's it's just dated it small details like that obviously the haircuts the way people look the way people dress the clothes they wear some portraits in a1 are agreed upon you know there's cafe waitresses sitting there for me patiently with my big 8 by 10 inch camera getting bored while i compose the thing so there's clearly stage agreed portraits in fact nearly all of that in a1 is except the first portrait which is on the streets and bank of england some young executives and there's a woman walking past in margaret thatcher blue and he's got his blue tie on and it's sort of accidentally flipped over his arm and it's you know this connection of thatcherism color and that's an unstaged street portrait shot with a large format camera i just got incredibly lucky and got that and it connects very much with the work i did 30 years later you know on the streets of new york so there's a sort of yeah a loop around there [Music] i moved here 20 years ago to the united states i've been coming here a lot before then a lot actually was taking pictures here from about 98 onwards um [Music] and i did three bodies of work about the united states broadly speaking that third part called the present which is shot on the streets of new york city my home now it was about the wonderful inexplicable nature of big city life of the melange of people places characters you know treating the the whole city as a stage where people are coming in and going up someone you think is a the main character shuffles off to one side and someone you thought was a bit player to use the theatrical analogy comes in and they they become the central component of a picture and that flow between life moving and passing you by coming around the corner and you just stand there and wonder and look at that happening was was beautiful you know and and recognizing that almost karmic tranquility of standing there and watching [Music] life flow and spin around you turbulently you know and eddie off into the distance and something else arriving was almost therapeutic or buddhistic in a way you know of accepting life as it flows at you rather than trying to control it and stage it i know that isn't particularly a fashionable thing at the moment you have to control and stage and agree and uh give people the right to agree to be taking the picture off and not but then that means we will have nothing about how life was if all we're ever going to have is people standing against the wall agreed we're never going to know what the life on the street in tokyo or london or copenhagen or wherever is like it's all just going to be what someone's imagination thought up rather than what was happening at that moment [Music] it's younger people teenager to early to mid-20s shot at night out in clubs bars parties it's about a certain point of life where you shift from childhood to adult responsibility and you realize this some people make it quickly and easily some people get lost you see the world very clearly at that age you see the unfairness the wrongs of the world which is why there's so many powerful young activists out there and sometimes you just want to block it out you know you can you you get drunk you smoke cigarettes or whatever you want to do you take chemicals you know you just play loud music you dance yourself crazy that series oscillated between two things between pictures taken in clubs and basmatis without any lighting at all just impromptu portraits of individuals sitting drinking talking you know on their own watching and then other times i had a flash on the camera blitz which is between seeing the world super clearly every detail and escaping from it into blurry color stained soft out of sometimes missed focus this oscillation between seeing life too sharp too detailed every hair every poor no i don't want to see that i want to blur life for this time from this hour i was turning 40 then so as my having working out my own mid-life crisis letting go and realizing well that's gone now you know so it was a there was a personal note too which i don't you know talk about that much maybe the photographs are melancholic because that's me i'm always you know was a bit of a lone wolf in the you know photography is very much alone a lone wolf profession the type photography i do at least you sort of you're a solo operator you know observing the world trying to be relatively invisible but at the same time putting yourself a situation where something interesting is around you and just all you want to do is remember it you don't want to abuse anyone or be a sneaky uh hidden you know paparazzi type photographer no i it's not what i do the same i'm just trying to remember what i'm seeing in a certain situation so i go to this club and photograph something that inevitably held a bit of a mirror to myself and who i was and who i am at that time one thing i should add is you know the one thing i recognize is it was done in a central european city and it wasn't very it's not a very diverse country and this is 25 years ago 27 years ago now and there was almost no diversity in the pictures which is rather sad but that was reflective of how it was in that place and that time [Music] so [Music] i made these flowing sequences of pictures of meeting people and places that are totally unexpected what life would come up with you there's people scratching lottery cars at bus stops there's people standing waiting for a train to come or a bus to come there's unscripted impromptu moments arriving at you happening around you you can have a dialogue with a person or not it can go on and then they fade away from you off into the flow of time and life passing you by and that beautiful moment i i once compared it to like standing in a river standing in a small stream and watching the stream arrive and divide around your body and reform on the other side like you were never there and just carrying on and recognizing life doing that around you is something very powerful [Music] so [Music] a lot of what makes people unhappy is forces that you can't control you know around you and you feel that this is you know life is not something controllable that you know um you don't have a say in what's happening and when but if you can recognize that it's flowing around you and it and it's it's beautiful and wonderful however modest that moment be you can find a sort of peace there or acceptance of of the beauty of the everyday world you don't have to wait for the most spectacular sunset or the most interesting uh go to the far end of the other end of the earth to find some volcano somewhere you it can just be happening everywhere around you and you see that in some ways as much as shimmer is about the united states it's about learning to see life flowing and coming at you and moving past you and the sequences the stuttering sequences are in another way me saying take my hand let me walk you through recognizing life flowing around and past this moment let me let me guide you through it look at the sky look at the ground look at the person's hand let's look at their face again i just look back at the hand that's now their fingers are greasy from the food they're eating oh look there's a cloud happening across the road isn't that beautiful that bit of sun there okay the person is going now oh here's the can they left on the road gently guiding someone through feeling life's flow and the wonder of that you know and that can bring a kind of reward on its own a peace and acceptance [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] for the last 10 years the work has been more personal orientation to it of my partner my mother it isn't solely that there's a few things in the background that can come through but um my mother is just my mother you know but you hope that some universal understanding will come out of it of being able to relate to the you know the the general situation of looking at an aged parent of age of time passing of the slowness comes to life at that point taking a slow careful look at where you came from at who made you made you physically and made you character wise who you are to a large degree before it's too late is a very important thing to do it's almost an artistic cliche though as many painters have painted their mother from centuries but to do with the veracity and accuracy of photography is quite powerful in a way it's it still upsets me you know and i look at it now and she passed away two years ago almost two years ago now and [Music] it's very evocative it's strange how that power photography to bring someone back to life to to reanimate them [Music] i put together these three strands of thing one was um my partner asleep sent me asleep on in various better breakfast hotel rooms we were actually they're all in new zealand they're all the other side of the world as it were and she's asleep so she's on the other side of consciousness in a way the rainbow is in ireland uh all in had to be an island which of course peace a sort of peace has come a provisional piece has come and lasted in ireland for 20 something years now which is wonderful so they found a sort of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and then the third thing i did was was literally gold shops in new york city this was around 2007 2008 at the time of the subprime mortgage crash and the short price of gold shot up and so they're all like gold gold gold bring us your gold you know trying to buy back chains and jewelry from people for pennies on the dollar to scrap gold and of course gold is at the end of the rainbow according to the irish myth you know you'll find the pot of gold it's very elusive what i'm hinting at there including the title does yellow run forever which is of course a nonsensical title but does love last is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is there happiness in wealth is it happens to be found in the most magical moment of simply staring at a cliche of a rainbow so i put together those three things these rainbows these gold chops my partner sent me asleep as a sort of provocative uh blend of interrogation self-interrogation what i value what what you want to do with your life do you want to chase that pot of gold do you want to prioritize love do you want to embrace the magical beauty of the world the rainbows these this spectacular natural phenomenons beauty love wealth what matters how do you how do we all balance these we all have to live we all have to pay rent we look for love we look for partners we look for happiness and it was an interrogation of that [Music] you know that's when the christians of photography is you know this buzzword intentionality that it lacks this that a painter puts every mark on the painting they're responsible for every brush stroke a sculpture is every you know every ounce of that form is there and photography you're like yeah click got it all and did you intend that but to embrace that improvisation to embrace that you know that is the wonder of adobe the fact that it embraces the out-of-control helter-skelter nature of life coming at you and saying i accept it all i accept that there was this bird flying up here that someone was over there this person blinked and that someone was tripping up over there and or someone looked at me a scance or someone was you know it too someone was falling over in the present someone trips right in front of me and people keep thinking i staged it and i didn't but to embrace that it's a way of accepting the burden of life you know and embracing it i mean you walk in with a broad idea of what you want to do but you can't force the world to conform to what you wanted to and you can but that's a different type of artistic practice but i want to much more you know to try and you know i always feel like i have an artistic collaborator and it is the world you know the photography i've loved has had this dance with life it's had this you know it's like a you've got this partner who you are waltzing with and you're trying to see where they're going and how they're doing it and it's your job to follow their lead rather than the other way around you know you've got to do it what's the ginger roger phrase backwards and in high heels whereas fred astaire was always leading the way and life is the fred astaire and you the artists are the ginger rogers trying to follow their movements and how they go and where they go and keep in step with them and accept the flow and release your artistic pretensions and ideas and accept what comes at you and embrace that [Music] you

Channel: Louisiana Channel

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Keywords: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum, art, photography, photographer, photo, paul graham, paul graham photography, paul graham interview, paul graham photographer a1, paul graham photographer interview, paul graham end of an age, paul graham sussex, paul graham photos, paul graham photographer camera, paul graham american night

Id: H7H5LP_u81Y

Length: 27min 39sec (1659 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 30 2022