With great integrity and a kind of "tender distance", Paul Graham captures ordinary life unfolding at street level and in possible encounters between people. For a number of years, Louisiana has acquired works by this distinguished English photographer - who usually works in series - and they could be seen together in the Column Gallery.
Paul Graham (b. 1956) photographs the inconspicuous life of people in the city. While everything in his images looks completely ordinary, there is always something compelling about their very ordinariness.
Ordinary, however, is not the same as random. Graham’s series American Night depicts racial inequality in the United States, and his portraits of his mother are both existential and empathetic. His work ranges from the reality of a tiny event – man crossing street – to more extended narrative sequences.
Graham can be seen as a documentary photographer capturing life’s potential stories. His sequences of images taken a few seconds apart evoke the flow of a film while highlighting the gaps between frames. Both continuity and disconnection are at play.
Graham often works in series and has published numerous distinctively designed books of his photographs. His pictures are installed according to his specifications. The Louisiana has been acquiring works by Graham for its collection since 2009 – all of them were on show as part of this presentation in the Column Gallery below ground.
On Louisiana Channel
“I always feel I have an artistic collaborator – and it is the world,” states Paul Graham in this in-depth interview with Louisiana Channel, where he talks about his life, career, and reveals his thoughts on photography.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Paul Graham (born in Stafford, UK, 1956) has worked solely in the photographic medium for almost five decades. While studying Microbiology at Bristol University, he discovered art photography and decided to pursue that full-time after graduating. His work in color from the late 1970s was critical in moving documentary practice forward from classic black and white photography.
His break-through came with three bodies of work from the UK during the 1980s. Firstly A1- The Great North Road (1981/2), then during Thatcher’s unemployment crisis Beyond Caring (1984), and lastly a series from Northern Ireland during the troubles of the mid-1980s Troubled Land (1984-6).
Since then, he has travelled, worked and exhibited widely. His photography has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the inaugural show of Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, and a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2000, he moved to the US, completing three notable series of work, including a shimmer of possibility, which won the first Paris Photobook prize as the best photography book of the past 15 years. He lives in New York City.
