13 Sept 2007 to 14 Oct 2007
Hours : Tuesday - Saturday 10.00 am - 6.00 pm
Opening on the 12th of September, 6-8 pm
Anthony Reynolds Gallery
60 Great Marlborough Street
W1
London
United Kingdom
Europe
p: +44 (0) 207 439 2201
m:
f: +44 (0) 207 439 1869
w: www.anthonyreynolds.com
Paul Graham has always challenged his medium, working with its very nature, its dependence on light, its recognition of detail, its document of the moment. His social commitment and historical perspective is unrelenting, his pictorial brilliance illuminating. He has always sought the telling trace hinting at the broader picture, leaving out as much as he puts in. For nearly thirty years Graham has been one of the most influential photographers, the author of dozens of iconic images and series that have had a profound effect on the course of many illustrious careers.
a shimmer of possibility is another radical departure: images assembled from everyday life in today’s America, filmic haiku where nothing much happens but nothing is foreclosed. What do you do or think or see when you walk down the street? How does that make your experience and how much is it made by your experiences?
A smoker at a bus stop has the gravitas of a figure from a heroic frieze. A homeless flower seller steps into a timeless mysticism. A little girl plays alone with her Barbie dolls; a junkie, packed in his box, shoots up in the headlights of a passing car. Two people stroll home with a box of Pepsi, glancing sideways as they pass kids at play in a back yard; lorries come and go outside the meat market; after her fried chicken, a woman sitting on a New Orleans doorstep sucks a cigarette through her greasy fingers. Hair perfectly parted, in a perfectly groomed roadside park, a little boy picnics on McDonalds with his shiny family. In a city street, cherries lie scattered on the sidewalk. Each image or sequence is a tale of our world, its despair, hope, grace, dignity, and little histories - all there to be picked up or passed by, wondered over or dismissed, shrugged off or embraced. The succession of moments that add up to a life.
Like a short story by Chekhov, these works are exquisitely fashioned pauses in a continuing narrative, the history and the sequel being our own. They don't tell us what to see but remind us how we see. They reveal the power of the passing encounter, the need to be aware and the richness of experience to be extracted from the everyday.
Paul Graham, will be talking about his new work at the National Portrait Gallery at 7 pm on Thursday, 11 October. Organised by PLUK Magazine, advance tickets are available from the NPG on 020 7306 0055.
October will see the launch by steidlMACK of an extraordinary publication on Graham’s new work. This comprises a boxed set of twelve individual volumes in an edition limited to 1000 copies. Each volume takes up one tale, one image or one sequence of stories woven together in time or place. The form of the publication reflects the nature of the work, an anthology of observations to be scattered and re-assembled, a collection of haunting glimpses of life that return time and again, to shimmer with possibility.
A major survey of Graham’s work will be staged by the Folkwang Museum in Essen late next year and will travel to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Whitechapel Gallery in London
