Photo: Paul Graham; Burning fields, Melmerby, North Yorkshire, September 1981 from the series A1 – the Great North Road
The current exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in East London, Paul Graham: Photographs 1981-2006, presents over 25 years of work from the British photographer. The exhibition spans from Graham’s earliest works (the A1 – The Great North Road, where Graham exchanged the romanticised images of the great American road trip for the somewhat less romantic terrain of the A1 motorway), to his more recent works, where the artist has travelled across the United States on his very own photographic journey.
I find much of Graham’s work during the 1980’s of particular interest at the moment in light of current economic conditions, most notably the series Beyond Caring (1984-85). These images document the people and environments of dole offices across the country at a time when the previous Conservative government was picking apart British industry and consigning millions to unemployment. The photographs present us with the grim realities of this life.
Photo: Paul Graham; Man reading paper, Bloomsbury DHSS, Central London, 1985 from the series Beyond Caring
Take Man reading paper, Bloomsbury DHSS, Central London (1985) as an example. A dozen or so people sit in a waiting room, bored, tired, dejected. Next to the man reading a paper sits a woman, hand under her chin, elbow resting on her knee – staring blankly at the space in front of her. Two aristocratic figures are painted onto the wall behind her, peering over their glasses, with sneering smirks on their faces. The scene represents what is so powerful and enigmatic about much of Graham’s work; these scenes of bored, unemployed working class victims of Thatcherite Britain, caught in the grasp of government red tape and social despair, have not lost any of their power or the emotive anger of the photographer at the time.
Walking around the images in this series, it’s impossible not to feel this anger too. As a final year university student witnessing the systematic destruction of further and higher education and a child of a 1980s County Durham pit-village, the photographs strike at the feelings and rage being experienced and expressed by a whole new generation of working class people in this country.
After Beyond Caring came Graham’s exploration and account of the political situation in Northern Ireland (Troubled Land, 1984-86). This body of work represented a change in style for the photographer, as he turned his camera to the tiny details of everyday life. Graham set about capturing political posters, Union jacks stuck to trees, soldiers on residential streets – the small signs that conflict was embedded within every moment of the lives of the people who lived there.
Photo: Paul Graham; Atomic Cloud Photograph, Hiroshima & Cat Calendar, Tokyo 1990 from the series Empty Heaven
At the end of the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, Graham started to travel further abroad, and the series Empty Heaven (1989-95) documents his journeys through Japan. Of note within the exhibition is Atomic Cloud Photograph, Hiroshima & Cat Calendar, Tokyo 1990, where we are presented with the juxtaposition of four kittens on a bright calendar and four plumes of smoke in Hiroshima, assumedly taken at the end of the Second World War. The positioning of these two images next to each other causes the viewer to stop and take in both images, separate in time, place and meaning, yet joined through symmetry.
Paul Graham: Photographs 1981-2006 is on at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, 20 April – 19 June. Admission free.
A quick side note: On my way back from the Paul Graham exhibition today, I stopped off to see the Gabriel Orozco exhibition at the Tate Modern for a second time. I went after it just opened and it’s still as amazing now as it was then. It’s only on until the 25 April, so if you haven’t seen it yet, get to it!
A secondary side note: If you know of any other good exhibitions going on at the moment, let me know in the comments section below!
