Paul Graham 'a shimmer of possibility’ at The Douglas Hyde Gallery
Sarah Allen reviews one of Dublin's most anticipated photography shows in 2012
Paul Graham’s artistic practice unashamedly locks horns with tradition. Early projects such as A1, Beyond Caring and Troubled Land broke from the norms of photojournalism eschewing its archetypal monochromatic idiom. In later projects, including 'a shimmer of possibility', it is manifest that Graham is continuing to challenge established canons and parameters of the medium.
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| New Orleans, 2006, from the series a shimmer of possibility. Courtesy of the artist, Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London and Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris |
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| Paul Graham, a shimmer of possibility, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Installation photograph by Rory Moore. |
Having moved to New York in 2002 Graham embarked on a road-trip across America which culminated in the publication of a twelve volume photobook entitled 'a shimmer of possibility'. The images included in this exhibition draw from that photobook and therefore only represent slices of a larger project.
Attempting to pierce what the artist calls the “the opaque threshold on the now” Graham pays homage to the seemingly insignificant moments of life: a man mowing a lawn, women carrying groceries, discarded cherries on a footpath. This exhibition encourages a new way of seeing that trades striking beauty for the profundity of the commonplace. Never tiring of tedium, Graham's episodic methodology embraces the use of several photographs of the same subject which track their progression through time, an approach he describes as ‘cinematic haiku’. He presents his protagonists like pieces on the chessboard of life moving back and forth, the poetry of quotidian existence shimmering through the facade of the mundane. The viewer too becomes a player in this game, shifting our gaze from one image to the next, following the subjects’ movements through the photographed continuum.
Exhibition installation that breaks from the shackles of convention has become a calling card of Graham's practice. In this exhibition images are printed in varying sizes juxtaposed rhythmically in irregular groupings. The hanging seems to suggest a stream of unconsciousness and invites the viewer to float through the moments, perhaps passing over one to be transfixed by another—a process which mimics how images emerge and recede from our consciousness with varying degrees of significance. In several series of images we see Graham adopt a shallow focal depth as well as capturing the same subject with a shifting focus echoing the filtering and spot-focusing functionality of the human eye.
The experience of viewing 'a shimmer of possibility' in book form is distinctly different to viewing it in the gallery context and it was interesting to see how the book translated to the gallery wall. The book format is more intimate and ultimately mediated; Graham retains much more control over the flow of the images. Indeed retaining this control seems especially crucial to his process. When presented on the gallery wall the viewer becomes master of the images' narrative progression. It could be argued this detracts from their fluid advance but the layout at the Douglas Hyde show was very considered. And even if the viewer is not intended to simultaneously absorb the images—after passing over each snippet of time it was extremely rewarding to stand back and appreciate the bigger picture—an act that is rendered impossible with the book format.
Graham’s images are not formally meticulous and at times have a snap-shot quality. But this is hardly surprising. Graham is not a formalist. Here it seems the artist's aesthetic is married to his images’ function; these are modest commentaries and so they are somewhat stylistically modest too. Even the labels in the exhibitions retain lower case lettering as if to mimic the humble nature of their subject.
Gallery two contained one of the most memorable series of images in the exhibition. Crowned by coarse, orange hair and wearing a checkered shirt, a woman snacks on a take-out meal of chicken. A sense of the artificial and the over-processed links her hair, the food and the polystyrene box from which she eats. The stages of her meal are captured in striking detail, in particular one of the final frames which shows the woman—hands still smeared in grease—indulging in a deep drag of a cigarette, savoring it as if it was the most delectable desert.
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| Pittsburgh, 2004, from the series a shimmer of possibility. Courtesy of the artist, Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London and Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris |
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| Paul Graham, a shimmer of possibility, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Installation photograph by Rory Moore |
Though not bitingly cynical or glaringly kitsch in the manner of his peer Martin Parr, there is something shared in Graham’s voyeurism and latent estrangement. It could be ventured that there is little empathy found between photographer and subject. This could be interpreted as a self-conscious subversion of one of the tenets of documentary photography—that it should be compassionate and adhere to a higher moral code. Graham’s unflinchingly frank lens captures his subjects warts and all, often in ungraceful moments. But it is life itself that Graham stalks and life is at times ungraceful; in his distillation of the unremarkable he is resolutely unbiased. But although the poetry of life may shimmer in these images it is difficult to grasp the ‘possibility’ for any of his subjects. For Graham’s subjects it seems the shimmer of possibility is slowly receding into obscurity, if not completely vanished.
Although residing within the confines of ‘fine art’ it is hard not to conclude that Graham’s work is motivated by some form of social commentary. Almost all of Graham’s works contained within this exhibition document the underprivileged. The images seem to nudge at certain issues but retreat from the direct battlefields of didactic commentary moving towards the more abstract realm of conceptual themes. Graham’s vignettes of time are not calls to reform but calls to reflect.
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| Paul Graham, a shimmer of possibility, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Installation photograph by Rory Moore |
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| New Orleans, 2004, from the series a shimmer of possibility. Courtesy of the artist, Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London and Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris |
A central theme that Graham engages with is that of time, a chief concept of photographic theory on a whole. Once a photograph is taken it is both present and past but it is as if Graham seeks to tease out the present and more fully articulate the past. Thus it seems Graham’s decisive achievement in ‘a shimmer of possibility’ is his success in emancipating photography from the reign of the singular moment; an effect which is touched on by the artist when saying "perhaps instead of standing at the river's edge scooping out water, it's better to be in the current itself, to watch how the river comes up to you, flows smoothly around your presence, and reforms on the other side as if you were never there."
'a shimmer of possibility' was on display in the Douglas Hyde Gallery between the 27th July and the 19th of September 2012.
