Paul Graham

I was recommended to look at the work of Paul Graham by my tutor. His name rang a bell. Peter Fraser also talked about him quite a bit in his lecture which I attended.

I followed the link which my tuture provided me (http://www.paulgrahamarchive.com), but decided that I would read some of the articles on there before looking at his work.

The first article is by someone writing about Graham's work - David Chandler (http://www.paulgrahamarchive.com/writings.html). He talks about Graham's approach almost as a stream of conscious activity, but with the same meditative seriousness with which Fraser talked about his work. Apparently he was inspired by some of the writings of Chekhov. There is a quote in the article which seems to fit wonderfully:


‘And when he was crossing the river on the ferry, and then when he was walking up the hill, looking down at his own village and across to the west, where the cold crimson sunset was glowing in a narrow band, he realised that truth and beauty, which had guided human life in that garden and at the high priest’s, had continued to do so without a break until the present day, and had clearly always constituted the most important elements in human life, and on earth in general; and a feeling of youth, health, and strength – he was only twenty two years old – and an inexpressibly sweet expectation of happiness, of unfathomable, mysterious happiness, gradually overcame him, and life seemed entrancing and miraculous to him, and full of sublime meaning.'
                                                                                       Anton Chekov, The Student

The article I read which is written by Graham is also very interesting (http://www.paulgrahamarchive.com/writings_by.html) - particularly because Fraser actually talked about it at one point and quoted a section from it. In this article Graham talks about how it seems to be difficult for art critics and curators to conceive of his work and others like it as art. Because it isn't staged like the tableau photography of Jeff Wall (for example).

He makes an attempt to describe how the work of artists such as himself should be conceived:
"So, what is it we are discussing here - how do we describe the nature of this photographic creativity? My modest skills are insufficient for such things, but let me make an opening offer: perhaps we can agree that through force of vision these artists strive to pierce the opaque threshold of the now, to express something of the thus and so of life at the point they recognised it.  They struggle through photography to define these moments and bring them forward in time to us, to the here and now, so that with the clarity of hindsight, we may glimpse something of what it was they perceived.  Perhaps here we have stumbled upon a partial, but nonetheless astonishing description of the creative act at the heart of serious photography: nothing less than the measuring and folding of the cloth of time itself."

And it was these last few words which Fraser quoted - "nothing less than the measuring and folding of the cloth of time itself".

The second article is certainly one I will read again and again - Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult - which covers everything that title implies. Both the democracy and the speciality of the act of taking photographs.

And then I looked at some of his work.

A1 - The great north road : I looked at this set for 2 reasons, 1 because it looks like it was his first set and 2 becauase I remember the A1 a lot from my childhood in Lincoln. There is a sense here of travelling down this road and capturing something of it's transience and wastefulness of being on the way somewhere  passing through as opposed to having arrived. Some of the photographs have wonderful colour, the following shot is entirely what I envisaged when saying I wanted to capture green trees and blue sky to show similar colours:

End of an age : This is really interesting. The set is a series of portraits of different people which in turn show the subject at turning angles so that across the set it is as if a single subject is turning round, almost like an animation.

American night: I found this set extremely powerful. Again, the sequence seems to be very important. Very light high contrast photographs which seem to have a single, drifting figure in the centre of a flat, urban landscape. The figures I think are black. And then periodically the image is instead a high contrast, highly saturated photograph of middle class suburaban house and instead of any figure there might be a car. Later in the sequence are pictures of people, all black, again drifting, but this time up close and very personal.

I'm not sure how to describe this set and the emotional resonance it has. Unsettling. Unnerving. Hypnotic.

Seeing Paul Graham's work has underlined and increased my interest in having work as a set where the whole is greater than sum of it's parts.