Book Review: Photographer Paul Graham Finds the Patience of a Painter
Paul Graham. Image from ‘Mother’ (MACK, 2019). Courtesy of the artist and MACK
By Micaela Bahn
There have been numerous publications of Paul Graham’s photography, but only Mother finds its resonance in the deeply intimate. It is no easy task for an artist to hold the viewer’s attention with a series of consistent, quiet portraits. As viewers, we often wish to be visually entertained by complexity and contradiction. So, it is compelling that Mother finds its success in more subtle tones of the untidy human experience: maternal love and the inevitable reversal of familial roles. Graham provides a moving meditation on the value of caretaking by capturing the fraying threads of his own elderly mother’s life. Mortality, sometimes a brutal thought, is made tender.
Mother is comprised of fourteen portraits, each a study of Graham’s elderly mother as she dozes in the same armchair in her nursing home. The consistency of the artist’s care is imbued in the aesthetics of the images: a stable and soft natural light source, the woman’s pastel sweaters, the camera’s uniform angle. Her face is nearly always tilted and her mouth closed. It is a position that is sweet and dignified. In all of these simple regularities, we witness Graham implicitly give his mother the same gentle attention that he had once received.
Paul Graham. Image from ‘Mother’ (MACK, 2019). Courtesy of the artist and MACK
While the images give the impression of an extended portrait, subtle variations in attention ensure that each image is a living document. Nearly imperceptible shifts bring the camera’s focus from the fine threads of his mother’s blouse to wisps of silver hair out of place, and then to the soft creases in her face. It is a contemplative survey, where age can be explored as a precipice or a suspended state. As you turn the pages, you can almost hear his mother’s steady breath.
Simultaneously, one cannot help but feel a slight discomfort in the unusual proximity to aging and the passage of time that the series provides. There is nothing intrusive about the images––his mother gave consent to the collection and sat for it––but it is certainly unusual to frankly explore the shrinking world of old age in public. In a society where narratives of aging are marginalized and relegated to the private sphere, Graham’s book achieves something profound in sharing these intimate photographs with the world.
Paul Graham. Image from ‘Mother’ (MACK, 2019). Courtesy of the artist and MACK
In that sense, the series is atypical for the photographer. Throughout his career, Graham focused on the everyday lives of strangers in England. For his first series A1 – The Great North Road, he traveled the length of England and documented the country’s overlooked communities and citizens. In the forty years since that seminal work came out, Mother is the first series that captures a personal subject.
Graham does not offer an accompanying text to Mother. He allows the universal— tender, unqualified love—to create the language through which we engage with the photographs. The book is a love letter that arrives at weightless devotion.
Mother (2019) by Paul Graham published by MACK
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