Thus far, 2009 has been the year of Paul Graham. The British-born photographer’s study of American life, a shimmer of possibility, is on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art through May 18; he is on the shortlist for the £30,000 Deutsche Börse Prize; and a mid-career survey of his work, which opened in January at Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany, and will travel to Hamburg and London. SteidlMACK has also released a new single-volume edition of shimmer (originally a 12-volume set), and another book, simply titled Paul Graham, to match the survey.
   
Graham, who currently lives in New York, recently corresponded via email with PDN about the influence of American photography on his photographs, his creative process, and why the “documentary” label misses the mark in describing his work.

PDN: Why did you choose to move to and work in the United States?

Paul Graham: I am a great admirer of American Photography of the period 1966-76, or let's say, from New Documents to New Topographics. For me, it's one of the great postwar American art movements, with people like Winogrand, Robert Adams, Arbus, Shore, Eggleston, etc. Their work explored that fertile territory where the documentary and artistic impulses of the medium coalesce, and established a new artistic space in which to operate. That is the same territory that I work in, and so it's right for me to be here, where it is embraced and promoted at the highest level.

PDN: At a recent discussion at New York's School For Visual Arts (SVA) you said that you would suggest a mid-career move to another country to other artists. Why? What has it changed for you?

PG: All I can say is that it has been great for me and I sincerely recommend it. Everyone should live in another country at some point in their life—it challenges your preconceptions, expands your horizons from the lottery of your birth, and aids in understanding what bonds us as human beings.

PDN: During the SVA conversation you also said that all photographers are editors, but only some are good post-photograph editors of their work. Can you describe your edit process and talk about how you developed your ability to edit your work?

PG: I think about what I do, and try to make sense of it, for myself firstly and thus, hopefully, for others. That's my edit process. There seems to be this unspoken assumption that intuition is good and intellect is bad in photography, and that's simply false. Yes, photography is an unusual blend of the two, where you need to both be open and sensitive to the world around you, yet at the same time accept that we are sentient beings and eventually grasp what we can through our minds. The hostility to this, the idea that “Joe's 20 best snaps” as an exhibition or book is somehow okay, is a rationalization that serves people’s refusal to think about the what and why of their photography.

PDN: How do you think the reader’s interaction with shimmer will change with the single volume publication? Did you take any steps in the design of the new edition to make the experience similar to that of looking at the 12-volume edition?

PG: I designed it myself, like I do with all the books. Yes, it’s a trade off, but one that is worth it so that 4000-plus new people can get to see the work at affordable prices, rather than a handful of fast moving buyers and greedy book dealers who got the first print run...

PDN: At what point did literature and literary theory become important to your photographs? Can you explain how reading about literature has informed your creation of images?

PG: I'm really not a giant reader, but certainly when you see how people explore the form of the modern book, the different voices and structures they use, it can be very inspiring. Books that are palindromic in their chronology for example, like Cloud Atlas; or the tricks and devices used by the Oulipou movement of French writers like Georges Perec, who wrote a book without using the vowel 'e'—A Void—and followed that up with one that only used the vowel 'e'—The Exeter Text.  

My book End of an Age used a simple edit structure of ignoring all my esthetic choices to place the sequence of pictures according to the body turn, which lead to all the portraits making a pirouette across the whole book. That is an Oulipian strategy—the world makes little sense, but by imposing some arbitrary structure on it, you begin, paradoxically, to reveal something of the deeper unspeakable issue itself.

PDN: So then has literature mainly been an influence on how you edit, structure and present your work, or has it influenced your esthetic choices?

PG: No, be careful not to put the cart before the horse. I make the work from the world, not according to a book I read. It’s only later when I reflect about what is forming across the images that stuff from books or essays comes into play, and I begin to see linkages and commonality, to notice how structures and artistic strategies might work. I could equally have talked about musical forms in relation to some of the shimmer pieces, but literary associations are easier.



PDN: In previous interviews you have noted that Chekhov’s short stories, how he wrote about “simple, everyday things… without guff or show, simply described, with nothing proscribed,” had a bearing on the shimmer project. At what point did the relation between the shimmer images, which you have called “filmic haiku,” and Chekhov’s short stories occur to you?

PG: About halfway through, when I was beginning to understand what worked, what didn't, and the potential it had. I read an interview discussing Chekhov's writings, and that cemented it as a valid way of working.

PDN: American Night dealt with the African American underclass, as do certain portions of shimmer. What interests you in this aspect of the American cultural landscape?

PG: American Night deals, among other things, with the underclass, a lot of whom happen to be African American, though there are White and Hispanic people in there too. Anyone with their eyes open in the United States today cannot fail to be concerned about the “Fracture Social” as the French call it, which does fall often along racial lines.

In respect of this question, I would like to make it clear that a shimmer of possibility has a positive and uplifting aspect, and I believe that work is essentially an optimistic and life affirming one—look at the pictures of the young brother and sister playing basketball in the twilight, or the dignity of the man cutting that huge grass hillside in the rain and sun. Both these examples are African American, as it happens.

PDN: Were you aware of a sense of optimism as you were making the photographs—was it something you could feel and see in your subjects—or were you simply concentrating on composition and esthetics? Did you realize the optimism present in the subject matter before you imposed your structure in the edit?

PG: Don't misunderstand me—it’s not only “optimistic”—that's one quality it possesses. Good work is many things all at once. Optimistic. Sobering. Documentary. Fiction. Poetic. Journalistic. If you simply start out thinking “I'll make optimistic images of people across America!” you are quickly going to end up with a trite piece of nonsense.
 
PDN: You have mentioned that you switched from film to digital capture in the middle of the shimmer project—were you ever concerned about visual consistency?

PG: I find this a tedious issue. People make way too much out of the digital versus film. The challenges in photography—focus, crop, shutter, aperture, and of course the biggest ones of all, the ones that really matter: what you actually point the camera at, and with what intelligence you use it... are all still there, completely unchanged. So quite whether that camera records the information with a piece of celluloid or a piece of silicon is of little significance. Get over it. I doubt anyone can go to the MoMA exhibition and tell me 100 percent correctly which images are digital and which are film.

PDN: At the SVA event you noted that nostalgia has been an unfortunate factor in recent interest in the work of certain photographers who were influential to you. How do you think social documentary work changes once the immediate context passes?

PG: Ah—the other D word: “Documentary”! The answer to that lays in looking at the work of Lewis Hine, August Sander, Bill Brandt, Robert Frank—all excellent photographers, all great artists, and thank goodness for them. Or how about quoting Walker Evans:

“I'm sometimes called a 'documentary photographer' but... a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I'm doing one thing when I'm thought to be doing another.”

PDN: In your 2008 essay on Tod Papageorge's book Passing Through Eden, you wrote that art made from “life as it happens… is regrettably viewed with suspicion in the art world. Misunderstood as a collection of lucky moments, fortuitous observations, or simply 'documentary', it has been bypassed or overlooked by many curators, writers and collectors who muddle it up with photojournalism, and are attuned mostly to assessing what the artist created.” Given that your work is currently hung in MoMA, and that you are having a mid-career survey as well, are you satisfied that the art world now appreciates work made directly from “life as it happens” and has realized its errors?

PG: Well, it's not a question of "errors." Of course Cindy Sherman's Film Stills, or Mapplethorpe's portraits, are stunning bodies of work. So is much of Jeff Wall or Thomas Demand or...  My point is simply that the art world is traditionally attuned to perceiving what the artist “created,” which in photography usually means that they pick up more on work with a synthetic quality—constructed scenes, Tableaux Vivants, staged pieces—these fit neater into this expectation and fit into the broader art world model of “what artists do” much easier. However, the great photography which operates at the core of the medium—from Frank to Eggleston to Shore to Winogrand—doesn't fit that model, as it is taken from life directly, unscripted and unforced. That creates problems and is often misunderstood or marginalized as 'documentary' or 'observational.' Now nobody in their right mind can deny the power of what Frank did, or the best of Eggleston, or Robert Adams, but sadly there's a lot of folks that don't get it, and prefer the traditional model.

Having said that... there's a lot of blame to lay in the photography community itself, for the plain dumbness and lack of discrimination that burdens the medium. We should fight that and be smarter and more discriminating in what we do, say and promote. It's an incredible medium, alive and direct, but we need to engage our hearts and minds in aspiring to make truly great work, that put any doubts beyond reach.