paul graham

A Shiver of Possibility

There are 12 volumes to Paul Graham’s A Shimmer of Possibility and nothing much happens in any of them. A man smokes a cigarette, a woman eats a meal and a couple walk home from the supermarket. The themes are humdrum and so are the pictures. There is no spectacular light, no fancy angles and no in-your-face portraits. Everything is direct, to-the-point and supremely quiet. Yet somehow, add it all up and you have a work that brings together the great movements of American photography in a seemingly effortless swoop that redefines what a photo book can be.

The first volume sets the scene. Two sets of sequences are spliced together to provide a gentle rhythm for the American dream to unfold against. In the first of 9 images, an African-American man mows grass above a roadway in Pittsburgh. In the background, tree covered hills are bathed in a hazy sunlight and everything seems somehow idyllic. The next shots are wider and Graham reveals more of the surrounding landscape - gas station signs, telegraph poles and fast food restaurants enter the image. The grass the man is mowing is by a car park, it’s flecked with brown and is arid. This is no rural idyll, and the mowing work is no walk in the park either. It’s labour and it’s hard. The man wipes his face and trudges back and forth, and back again, his brown van waiting for him to finish the day. And when the day is done, he can eat and wash and replenish himself. Graham hints at the food the man will consume, splicing the mowing sequence with images from a convenience store, its shelves lined with processed food that is a pale an imitation of what food should be.

This build up of images is typical for Graham. Over the last 20 years, he has excelled at the quiet image, books like Troubled Land and New Europe revealing the fractured nature of what we take for granted in life. “As a photographer, I’ve always been attracted to the less spectacular side of life,” he says. “I’ve never been an ambulance chaser. I want to capture the tiny little eddies, the rivulets of everyday life. For A Shimmer of Possibility, I was trying to make sequences (someone waiting for a bus or lighting a cigarette) and then I wondered how you can give those moments dignity. In a gallery, you can give those moments wall space that isolates them, but in a book they can get lost in a mass of images.”

The dilemma for Graham was how to separate each sequence. Inspired by the short stories of Chekhov, he began to think of how he could make each sequence unique in itself. “Chekhov told very anonymous stories in Russia. One story is of a schoolteacher walking how and meeting a landowner and talking to him in his carriage - nothing much happens but the story gives you a perfect idea of what life was like in 19th century Russia that is utterly revealing and fascinating.”

Graham decided that separate volumes was the best way to present his photographic short stories, the unnumbered volumes providing something for people to get hold of and mull over separately. “The physical side of the 12 books is different. It’s very modest and slightly disconcerting having so many of them. I had them in a domestic situation at my parents’ home - 2 of them were on the sofa, 5 on the table and my parents and I were all looking at them. That’s why they aren’t in a slipcase - so people can have them scattered around. They aren’t numbered either. I don’t want to proscribe things, but want to show the flow of life. I want it to be like watering the garden, not by throwing buckets of water over it, but by having the river flow through it - so the stories build up and resonate in a quiet way.”

The stories build up through osmosis - subsequent volumes reinforcing and building on those that came before. One volume mixes a man shooting up outside a fast food restaurant with a girl playing on the pavement on the side of the street. Both have the detritus of their everyday life scattered around them, both are oblivious to the denuded landscape that surrounds them. Another volume shows a couple carrying a case of Pepsi down the street, walking into the anonymous distance of a suburban Texas street.

The sequences and mixing of sequences have a rhythm that captures the viewer, something that is quite deliberate on Graham’s part. “There are 4 sets of individuals in sequences, 2 sequences which have two intertwining sets of pictures, and then there are books which have 4 sets of intertwining pictures,” says Graham. “Then I started doing things that relate to a particular time - one book is a series of images from a four-hour walk I took down a street in Boston.
The biggest book is of New Orleans. All the images were shot at one intersection - that’s about one geographical point.”

In New Orleans, Graham shows us people standing on street corners, crossing the road and simply passing by. An African-American with orange dyed hair eats orange food, then smokes a cigarette, her toothless cheeks sucking towards her gums as she inhales, a hint at a back story of violence, drugs and hardship. Street signs, cars and tarmac dominate, while the organic detritus of New Orleans pre-Katrina, a flurry of spilled red berries, provides just a little relief from an abused landscape built without even a passing thought for the people who would inhabit it.

Not that A Shimmer of Possibility is all doom and gloom. “There is joy in some of them,” says Graham. “The butterfly flying in the sky is joyous, the pregnant lady is joyous. The people you see in the book are the less privileged, but that’s the same anywhere. If you take a walk through London, you don’t meet the wealthy people.”

Indeed, the most extreme of Graham’s poor people are almost marginal in the book - just as they are marginal in society. More prominent are those who carry on with their daily lives, reading the paper, or buying their food at shops like the local Meat Market. The thing everyone has in common is they live in a world that is dominated by tarmac and commercial typography, a world that shows debasement of life through the constructed environment. It’s the same for the wealthy. Their homes might be grand, but the attempts to control and order the natural environment still begin to scar the landscapes they inhabit.

Graham is very aware of where his work comes from. “There were 2 great shows in the most important decade in American photographic history - The New Documents in 1967 showed the work of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus, and the New Topographics in 1975 featured Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz. They were spectacular shows and, together with work like William Eggleston’s colour photographs, reflected American society and landscape at a particular point in time.”

Graham’s work combines key street and topographic elements, so much so that it almost seems like a condensed history of American photography, right down to the interminable cloudscapes that pepper the book. It is street photography that is both difficult in its complexity, but also simple in the extreme. Graham points and shoots and that is all. This simplicity is problematic for some people. “What the art world likes is where you can see what the artist (Jeff wall or Gregory Crewdson for example) is doing,” says Graham. “They’re composing their picture, they’re lighting it, they’re staging it. Compare that to Garry Winogrand who some people in the art world thinks just makes snapshots. But other people, and I am one of them, do appreciate that his achievement is equal to or greater than that of an artist like Wall.”

Like Winogrand, Graham photographs what he sees. Unlike Winogrand, the photographs in A Shimmer of Possibility are (with the odd exception, such as Graham’s intersection picture where 10 things seem to be happening in every direction - a nod to Winogrand if ever there was one) so unassuming that they almost fall into the page. This quietness, together with the sequencing of pictures forces you to look at the pictures, to wonder what the photograph, and the book, is about. As soon as you are drawn into the book, the little things come to the fore - the postures, the expressions, the symbols of love and hope and despair. In fact virtually all the great themes of documentary photography appear in the 12 books, but in such a way that the visual cliches of drugs, race and poverty, and America itself, are left behind.

Where the Shimmer of Possibility lies, I’m not sure. It’s not in the mutilated tree that looks like a hand with the fingertips cut off, nor is it in the man scratching and losing on a street side garbage bin. Perhaps it’s in the people who Graham photographs, who are ordinary but have an existence that goes beyond Graham’s demythologised America. Or perhaps it’s in the last book, where the sun sets over a suburban street and a boy and girl play basketball as dusk falls, their youthful energy set against the down-at-heel homes. The book ends with a sequence of pop-arty images from a gas station. There are pickup trucks, petrol pumps and a flat roof rising against a blue and pink sky, a half moon dangling mid-centre, its glow dampened by the light from America below. There are possibilities there, but they do not exactly shimmer. A world dominated by oil, tarmac and steel, a world of lives sullied by mutilated landscapes. It seems to be more of A Shiver of Possibility that Graham shows?