Paul Graham : OCA day at the Whitechapel Gallery 21.05.11

OCA day at the Whitechapel Gallery for the Paul Graham exhibition

Saturday 21’st May 2011

had to wait about 20 minutes to purchase a ticket for the Underground
during which time I worked out exactly how to get there
as the direct route was not operating!

This day with fellow OCA students and Gareth Dent, OCA CEO, was a chance not just to meet other students one knew as internet presences but also to see an important exhibition by the contemporary photographer Paul Graham and be guided around it by Michael Lowton, an artist and member of the gallery staff. 

view from a tube train - London 2011

In spite of chaos on the London Underground, we all eventually met up outside the gallery and were welcomed by ML who took us straight into the exhibition as soon as we had been tagged with a light blue Whitechapel Gallery sticker.

Gareth Dent (right of centre) meets students outside the Whitechapel Gallery

Paul Graham, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(photographer)), winner of the 2009 Deutsche-Borse prize for his contribution to photography as a whole, is a fine art photographer although there is a documentary feel to much of his work. The exhibition is entitled “Paul Graham Photographs 1981-2006” and was described as "a mid-career survey" since the term "retrospective" would have implied that his work is finished which it obviously is not.

The exhibition concerns itself with "the idea of looking at things" though obviously this is only one way of considering the work; some visitors might see it in a different light. Personally, I found myself struck by the clever combination of the aesthetic and the documentary allowing one to be both informed by the work and also given the space to wonder about it. Some documentary work more or less forces one to think about certain subjects such as apartheid for instance, while here the viewer although directed towards certain subjects such as unemployment or the American Dream, is not being forced into a particular viewpoint. Graham’s work allows one to reflect. He had actually trained as a micro-biologist rather than an artist.

By photographing people watching television, the photographer has chosen to consider his immediate surroundings rather than a far away location.

One body of work entitled “A1: The Great North Road” shows Graham at the start of his career, drawing heavily on the work of American photographers who traveled the roads of their country in search of images that might encapsulate America. An obvious influence here is William Eggleston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Eggleston) who was one of the first photographers to make colour photography an acceptable medium yet the work of a Swiss photographer, Robert Frank, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank) who worked in black and white and created a book about his journey across America is no doubt another strong influence. Paul Graham’s conscious use of colour here with deep blue skies and yellowish buildings red interiors is quite obvious.

Another early body of work made between 1984 and 5 and called Beyond Caring was when I first became aware of him as a photographer. There was some talk at the time of Graham’s apparently trivial treatment of such a mundane subject as unemployment with further questions about the odd angles and perspectives this work produced, a result of often photographing surrepticously in government buildings of subjects who would have probably been reluctant subjects. One image that shows a child in pink surrounded by seated unemployed people caused a stir. Graham’s use of colour was considered frivolous in this situation, black and white would be much more appropriate yet Graham has never been the type of photographer to blindly follow in other’s footsteps.

The prints we see in the exhibition here are digitally produced; at the time, they would have been produced chemically in the darkroom and would have looked quite different. One wonders how much present day printing influences the impression we now have of these images.

Another series of images called Troubled Land (The social landscape of Northern Ireland) made between 1984 and 1986 shows the natural beauty of this part of the world. However, in each image there is a small area of detail, what Barthes might have considered as a punctum, that indicates a disturbing element such as soldiers searching a car; these throw light as well as perspective on the troubles Northern Ireland faced for a long time and has still not entirely rid itself of. In a book, these details are easily missed and this is one example of a gallery bringing out the best in a photograph particularly when a large format camera has been used to make the originals.

“Empty Heaven” is a series of images made in Japan between 1989 and 1995, which are said to contain “ideas of denial and concealment” with hidden signifiers in the work. The “hierachal and structured society” of Japan is mentioned as well as “suppressed memories of the past” evident in a photograph of an atomic bomb explosion. There is a photograph of a girl with a white face, apparently mimicking a Geisha, a tree at night wrapped up and twinned uncomprehendingly with the profile of a man’s slightly acned face … it is not easy to understand what these images are actually about. The superficiality of modern Japan perhaps though the onlooker may not draw such a conclusion since Japan is not an easy society to understand.

Ceasefire is a series of images made between 6 and 8’th of April 1984 to record a cessation of hostilities in a European war zone and shows only the sky with clouds; every image though is different with the sun wanly shining through formations of cloud while other images near the end of the sequence do not reveal the presence of the sun at all and are much darker in appearance.

New Europe is series of images that record an important part of Europe’s development when it was merging into one very large country rather than an economic union as had been the early idea. There is a touching photograph of a man looking at a modern city with its’ high rise buildings yet it does not take long to notice that this man is missing an arm. The New Europe has come at a price and is not so good as it might be considered as other photographs show drug taking, prostitution and women smoking. A slightly techie discussion took place among a few of us as to how a photograph of a well illuminated pillar with a crown of barbed wire wrapped around it, managed to be made with a dark background; I reckoned it was by using a flash probably at night but possibly by day and while most others thought it was a flash shot owing to the hard shadows, one wondered exactly how the background had been kept in the shadow ... perhaps it was further away that one imagined or the camera was close and a small aperture had been used!?

Another set of images called End of an Age 1996 to 1998 are described as a “candid portrait of a generation reaching adulthood on the cusp of the new millennium”. Not one of the subjects portrayed is looking at the camera and while some are sharply defined by well exposed and closely focused images, others are unfocused and present a fuzzy view. All the images are printed very large, filling the walls in this part of the gallery and were photographed in European nightclubs. There is a hedonistic feel to these images and interestingly, they have been more widely used without permission by companies such as Gucci than any other of his other images.

American Night, photographs made in North America between 1998 and 2002, is full of innuendo like much of Graham’s work. Here we see over-exposed images containing only a faint impression of detail and yet enough for one to understand visually what is happening in the image; others are printed very dark while still retaining detail. Black and White is a theme here that seems to be under exploration as black people feature in the black images while rich and poor is another subject also under the spotlight. There is an image perfectly exposed of a suburban house which seems to perfectly portray the American Dream though this body of images seems to be as much about the American nightmare of consumerism and racial tension. As with much of Paul Graham’s work, the images are untitled but place names and dates are given such as New York 1998 etc.

One might ask with this body of work as to why some images are greatly over-exposed though not with loss of actual detail while others are very dark and some are right in between. There are figures in some images but these are mostly solitary and a few are wheel chair bound, a comment on lives lost in battle zones elsewhere perhaps, an apparently necessary strategy to maintain the “heaven” of America.

A “Shimmer of Possibility” is another set of images made between 2004 and 2006 and continues the American theme. It includes the series of photographs made of a man mowing a lawn outside a hotel in Pittsburgh where the photographer was staying in 2004. This was unplanned and yet the session produced a remarkably varied group of images as did another set of a flower vendor in San Francisco (2006) in which the images are by and large unexposed showing him in the street, close up with different facial expressions and also his hands that grasp the flowers.

At the end of the exhibition, there is a collection of Paul Graham’s photo-books behind glass; one wants to take them out and handle them, look again at the images one has seen and see them juxtaposed with others one has not.

Gareth Dent (far right) and other students in the Archive Room
at the Whitechapel Gallery London

After viewing the exhibition we are taken to Gallery 5, the Archive Room, and here are a completely different set of photographs by Ian Berry, a Magnum photographer well known for his images of England. These are all in black and white, a sharp contrast to the colour of Paul Graham and a reminder that although they might be considered contemporaries since they worked at the same time for some of the time, they are from different eras of photography. Ian Berry was actually commissioned by the Whitechapel Gallery to photograph the area nearby for a book that never happened although an exhibition did. His beautifully crafted photographs of a time of great social change, hang on the walls of this room and reveal a world that is no longer observable.

In regard to Paul Graham's work, that which I found most interesting was not in the exhibition but in a book of his called Film which was published only this year. It is a list of extreme close ups of the crystals of different film makes, qualities that give it its’ distinctive character; the various emulsions photographed are all recorded by name at the back of the book. This is not only a very colourful and attractive book with images given full bleed on the pages, it is also a historical document as many of these films have now been discontinued. A book for techies? Hardly, as with so much of Graham’s work there is a curious blending of the scientific and the aesthetic which for me is the hallmark of good if not great photography, a view that I might well be held to account for by those who think it is all about art!!?

This brings my account to the next part of the day ... the discussion about the exhibition over a beverage, kindly provided for by the OCA.