British photographer Paul Graham has a reputation for creating images that both play with and defy genre. “When you look at them now it’s difficult to get a sense of just how groundbreaking he was in the early and mid-80s,” says curator Kirsty Ogg.
British photographer Paul Graham has a reputation for creating images that both play with and defy genre. “When you look at them now it’s difficult to get a sense of just how groundbreaking he was in the early and mid-80s,” says curator Kirsty Ogg. “He works with a rich photographic tradition,” she continues, “colliding different things unexpectedly, and creating a unique visual language.” This mid-career exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery looks back on 25 years of Graham’s photographs, and is the most significant showing of his works in the UK to date.
For his Troubled Land series, taken at the height of the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, Graham defies expectation with images that read both as landscape and war photography. “You think what you're seeing are innocuous landscapes, but embedded in each image is a small signifier of the conflict,” Ogg explains. Similarly, for Beyond Caring, his series that captures Dole Office inertia across Thatcherite Britain, Graham breaks with tradition and challenges what can be considered ‘serious’ photography by using colour. Even in the 80s, “people would have expected black and white from these sorts of ‘real’ images,” says Ogg.
At a time when photography was still pushing to be recognised as an art form in the UK, Graham was inspired by the punk DIY aesthetic, and by other photographers who weren’t waiting around to be taken seriously by photo-shy galleries and institutions. Of self-publishing his own works, Graham says, “[the punk] attitude was contagious, and was in a small but important way an impetus to break with the dominant motif of black and white photography in the UK. I definitely felt empowered in my belief that it was right to break away from traditions, and then to self publish at the end – the hierarchies of British photography be damned.”
With this spirit of defiance, Graham has amassed a body of work that captures his travels across Europe, Japan and America, where he currently resides. Also opening this week at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in the West End is another exhibition of Graham’s work – including images created from blow ups of spare bits of film rolls.
Paul Graham:Photographs 1981 – 2006 is at the Whitechapel Gallery until 19 June, 2011. Film is at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery until 4 June, 2011.
Text by Ananda Pellerin
Ananda Pellerin is a London-based writer and the Editor of www.wheelmeout.com
