"At this critical time in America's post-war history, Paul Graham makes photographs that have to do with what is not seen, misunderstanding, and a broken world.
He creates images that we see as the blind character in Saramago's novel would see the world, prints texts that cannot be read; he announces the loss of vision, the abandonment of clarity."
Val Williams, in American Night, Paul Graham, Edition steidlMack
Les filles du calvaire gallery presents, in conjunction with the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles, the American Night series by Paul Graham, who is exhibiting in France after a ten-year gap.
"Since the mid-1980s, Paul Graham has produced photographic works that have explored the boundaries between art and politics. In his latest series, American Night, he photographs the poor and excluded who populate the urban landscape of the United States. His chronicle of American life reflects the turmoil and stress of lives spent in deep solitude. Graham photographs his subjects as if through the eyes of someone almost blind. Standing out against backgrounds of street detritus, glimpsed through a milky fog, his figures are ghosts in a dying world.
Paul Graham was part of a group of British photographers who emerged in the 1980s as color social documentary photographers. They were interested in "Britishness", fascinated by a nation on the move, engaging in the radical social and economic reforms of Takerism that replaced the Welfare State consensus of the 1960s and 1970s. Photographers including Paul Graham, Martin Parr, Paul Seawright, Anna Fox, Paul Reas, and Nick Waplington, rejected traditional documentary practice by blending documentary methodology with a personal and idiosyncratic vision. At the heart of their work are political views of post-war society. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, they participated in an incisive critique of British social institutions. [...]
In 1968, Paul Graham published Beyond Caring, a study of Britain's social security offices, and in 1987, Troubled Land, which explored the political tensions of Northern Ireland. Both of Graham's photographic series looked at the cracks and stress points in British society. In Troubled Land he established what would become his documentary method for the years to come: a series of drab landscapes whose banality is subtly disrupted by the presence of sectarianism and conflict. Paul Graham was looking for traces, scraps of paper, various slogans, warnings, imprecations, the tiny indicators of an immense malaise. In these series, he brought color documentary photography up to date and influenced those who followed him, in particular Seawright and Fox. [...]
American Night is a story about peripheral, blurred vision and advantageous positions. Its characters wander the streets, along the highways, past fast-food joints, across parking lots, always alone, without apparent purpose. They wait and watch. In Paul Graham's photographic method of "day for night", they wander in a dreary fog, the white, visual noise of a stressed society.
However, American Night is not simply a critique of urban loss and damage. Sprinkled among his bleached, dreamlike images of America's poor outcasts and wanderers are color photographs of American homes. Graham reminds us that the photographer's vision is partial. Move a few blocks away from the squalid slums and you find yourself in a green paradise.
He makes these photographs easy on the eye, a visual feast. On the other hand, the white photographs are difficult to decipher, the diminutive silhouettes move around the street furniture and parked cars and almost disappear amidst the fast food storefronts.
And just when we thought we had found the logic that governs this memorable collection of photographs, (faded images of the poor, accomplished stylization of the luxurious dwellings), Graham again leads us down a false path. He inserts a section of documentary photographs; images of poor and destitute Americans who defy our times, who are rich, dark and full of energy as much as the white images are lethargic.
We know the photographic references of these street documentaries; an accentuated form of Walker Evans, Philip Lorca di Corcia confronting shoppers in their frantic rush. However, once again, Graham raises the bar by increasing the angst and darkness of compositions that seem familiar to us.
Here we are in front of a strangely distorting mirror held up to the white images, the traditional codes of photography held to ransom by a blurred and indistinct vision.
Because American Night is as much about photography as it is about the confused world we live in. It is a kind of treatise on the act of viewing, of representation - everything has been photographed in every possible way and the negation of vision is the only advance that photography can make.
When Paul Graham made Troubled Land in Northern Ireland, he crossed a cultural boundary and the photographs he made were an expression of his confusion, a struggle to capture the violence that only shows through the bands of color, the fragments of paper, the silhouettes in the distance. In American Night, he again studied a society that is foreign to him. He has not only looked at its margins but also at its elegant and prosperous center, and, as in In Umbra Res, he insists once again that "if you look away from the periphery of your vision, you can start to make something of it. [...]