A Shimmer of Paul Graham

and so at long last another video I have been a bit busy over the summer one of the places I visited just a few weeks ago was the town of arm in the South of France Oh most famous for the 15 months between february 1888 and May 1889 when it was the home to Vincent van Gogh during one of his most productive and artistically successful periods of his short life at least up until the unfortunate ear episode as a penniless artist myself it still rankles with me at this time and so many institutions and people across the globe have become fabulously wealthy on the back of van Gogh legacy when during his lifetime as you surely know he was subjected only to ridicule and local contempt but that's another story and certainly a whole other video that ours is also hosts every summer to luring contra to arm the justly celebrated international photography festival if you walk around no sun-drenched streets you will come across all sorts of municipal buildings halls churches with exhibitions of photographers both past and present mostly of a very high order indeed this year I suppose the star attraction for many people at least was William Wegman I first discovered Wegmans dog photos decades ago deep into the last century certainly so by now I'm rather bored with them I'm afraid to say once you've seen one wine marine or in fancy dress you've seen them all as far as I'm concerned but I went to see three shows in particular one was a sort of retrospective of Robert Frank's photographs of America in the 1950s the second was one of my favorite contemporary photographers and filmmaker Raymond Ecuador from his series America from the 1970s which was a terrific show these are a few sneaky installation photographs I took as I was walking around the exhibition it's easy enough to find photo books and online material about their pradhans photographs it's more tricky to find his film documentaries the last one of which I caught at a film festival a few months ago it was called twelve days about how we treat and institutionalize people with mental health problems and how the care workers themselves although very well-meaning kind of become abusive and institutionalized themselves in dealing with these issues not an easy watch that I'm a huge admirer of deford on social and political radicalism as ardent now as it was when he was first documenting workers living in the 1960s the third exhibition I want you to see and the star of this particular video is Paul Graham who was exhibiting his so-called American trilogy or at least part of it called the whiteness of the whale I first came across Graham I think when he won the Deutsche börse photography prize in 2009 he later won the Hasselblad award in 2012 and this image in particular caught my attention at that time is called lawnmower man that's what I call it from here's a shimmer of possibility series which is one of the series that makes up the American trilogy on the one hand it's an everyday scene almost a snapshot but on the other hand it's beautifully done that early evening light or early morning large it looks like evening to me slanting across the hills there the beautiful golden honey tonalities in the scene with the sort of ochre greens and yellows and blues and even that red solar flare that you can see there between his legs next to the blue towel that he's holding there's a kind of everything seems to be color-coordinated even though he I'm sure it isn't its that that's the scene that he saw it as he saw it but there seems to be a kind of Stars and Stripes theme to it now I don't know whether that red solar flare was actually hand colored after the event I don't know maybe too natural maybe it isn't but even if it is photoshopped Bravo for even thinking about it because it just it's just right there's a kind of familiar strangeness to this photograph but then later on probably about a year later I saw similar photographs of this same event and they were obviously done of the same series that I hadn't been aware of there were similar photographs but from a slightly different point of view from a slightly different time as well and position and I didn't quite understand what these were whether they were alternate images or rejects or what and so it was in this exhibition in are I was delighted to see the full suite of lawn mower images and I now understand what he was doing this is another example of a man smoking he will take a photograph of the subject and take a series of images some of them almost identical some of them slightly different from slightly different angles a detail part of a face a detail of the background something lying on the floor next to the subject for example it's as if we're actually walking around the scene talking to him our eyes are moving constantly from him to the wall to the detail so that over the course of 6 7 8 images whatever it happens to be we build up a picture in our heads of the scene as if we were there because in reality if we are talking to somebody we don't view them as a traditional photographic portrait sees them where you have the totality of the face in perfect focus and everything else is blurred out with a nice bit of Bakke human beings don't see as a camera sees our eyes are constantly moving we pick up details we pick up impressions and our brain fills in the gaps we look into people's eyes but then we glance at their hair at their rears down at their feet we look past them we look back into their eyes we knew from the left eye to the right eye and this is what Graham does in his work each image in the series is adding to your knowledge of the subject the entire series constituting one work one complete picture that you have pieced together I see this as a kind of continuation or perhaps even a homage to David Hockney's photo techniques of the 1980s I actually did a separate video on that a while ago there just to recap Hockney made some very interesting photographic works where he tried to use the camera to emulate human vision and human the human sense of perspective the fact that we have two eyes constantly moving searching focusing refocusing he tried to give this monocular two-dimensional machine the camera a more three-dimensional human aspect and I think he was rather successful in that he managed to give the photographic image normally so static and controlled a real sense of movement and depth this is another series of Paul Graham woman eating at a bus stop side of the head details of hands and finger food debris at her feet and an after-dinner smoke I wasn't sure when I was walking around the show whether the photographs were staged a lot of our photographers nowadays like to see themselves as film directors with actors and sets and big budgets too often but she doesn't look too happy to me so I don't think she's pretending you Paul Graham is doing something similar with these multi-image scenes to David Hockney well though he's not as interested in the nature of human vision or perspective as Hockney Hockney is fascinated by the constant struggle between the flatness of the picture surface and the multi-dimensional time and space in which we live but Graham is clearly trying to immerse the spectator into the scene by giving you a series of images often different sizes large and small hung right next to each other Palgrave may not share Hockney's obsession with turning photographic perspective inside out but he is a far more political animal than Hockney from his earliest work he is shown a concern for the underclass the unemployed of the dispossessed the overlooked in society in the 1980s he produced his series beyond caring which shows the unemployment offices and waiting rooms of job centers job centers in cities that no longer had any jobs as Margaret Thatcher's government in Britain those factories mines ports and sold off national assets to the highest bidder Graham moved to United States many years ago but his concern for social injustice has continued another series in his American trilogy is called American Knights which reflect the social fabric of contemporary America the haves and the have-nots the wealthy suburbs and the ghettos juxtaposed together which indeed they often are in reality a couple of blocks separating the millionaire's from the down-and-outs he uses the idea of over exposing the image of the poor districts to such an extent that they can hardly be seen at all they are faint ghostly images invisible physically and metaphorically to their rich neighbors at their sides I wasn't quite sure what to make of these huge white images to tell you the truth I appreciate the metaphor the idea of a literal invisibility compounding the social invisibility but it also smacked to me of art world gimmickry and perhaps a bit pretentious however as somebody once said anything serious and important veers towards pretension and as I walked out of this exhibition back into the bright sunlit and wealthy streets of Arles I was left in no doubt that Paul Graham is one of our most serious and important contemporary photographers

Channel: Still Life - Art and the photographic image

Views: 7,681

Keywords: photography, art, image, artists, photographers, contemporary art, Paul Graham, A shimmer of possibility, paul graham photographer, American Nights, contemporary photographer, art photography, Arles, photography festival, Paul Graham art, american photography, british photography, lawnmower man, les rencontres d'arles, Graham Paul, USA photos, American Trilogy, Paul graham in Arles, Raymond Depardon, Robert Frank, van Gogh

Id: QTyhYVwYw-k

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 09 2018