Book Review: A1 - The Great North Road
PLATE 40 GREAT NORTH ROAD GARAGE, EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER 1981. ©Paul Graham, Mack Books
By Samuel Stone.
The title of Paul Graham’s 1983 book seems at first to have very little to do with the content of its images. This is because photographing a road entails an inherent paradox: to capture the entire thing at once is virtually impossible, yet even the theoretical distant aerial shot would sacrifice the human and environmental elements ostensibly sought by the photographer in the first place. Graham, however, in A1 – The Great North Road, has navigated this challenge with subtle and profound grace.
PLATE 2 OLD METHODIST CHURCH, ARCHWAY, NORTH LONDON, NOVEMBER 1982. ©Paul Graham, Mack Books
The particular road situated at the center of Graham’s first book spans the United Kingdom longitudinally between London and Edinburgh over roughly four-hundred miles (643 km.) In pursuit of the essence of this centuries-old highway, Graham has often entirely forgone shooting the road itself, electing instead to capture images of those seemingly disparate elements which it unifies, elements which, by virtue of this unification, imply their unifying factor. Thus, the road is less of a positive presence in the imagery than it is the invisible substratum which binds together the positive presences; and for Graham, this foundational unity constitutes the vital essence of the Great North Road.
PLATE 10 INTERIOR, JOHN’S CAFE, SANDY, BEDFORDSHIRE, APRIL 1981. ©Paul Graham, Mack Books
PLATE 11 CAFE WAITRESS, JOHN’S CAFE, SANDY, BEDFORDSHIRE, MAY 1982. ©Paul Graham, Mack Books
Most of the photos portray patrons, proprietors, and employees of the numerous cafés along the route. There are portraits of motorists posing mirthlessly at medium distances outside vehicles that are nowhere to be seen; there are wide shots of multifarious landscapes whose only commonality (besides the Great North Road itself) is their variegated bleakness; and there are empty interiors of the roadside cafés.
Even in the photos in which the road itself does figure explicitly, it appears democratized with respect to the other elements of the composition—sometimes even subverted. Bear in mind, though, that the project is not titled “The People and Landscapes of the Great North Road,” or something similar, but A1 – The Great North Road.
For all its absence in Graham’s book, the road itself remains the conceptual center. The activity of the images that eschew explicit representation of the Great North Road is constituted of a sort of second-order double representation. There is the image of, say, the driver drinking tea in a café as representative of the driver; but there is also the driver as representative of the road, which is absent from the photo only literally.
PLATE 14 MAC’S CAFE, ALCONBURY, CAMBRIDGESHIRE, APRIL 1981. ©Paul Graham, Mack Books
PLATE 35 COUPLE ON DAY TRIP, WASHINGTON SERVICES, TYNE AND WEAR, MAY 1982. ©Paul Graham, Mack Books
Ultimately, Graham can only render his second-order subject in its conceptual fullness through these discrete fragments, which, in their detail, reveal its broader significance: its profound capacity to unify all that which lies along it, all those who traverse it.
PLATE 39 NORTH SEA, THE BORDERS, MAY 1981. ©Paul Graham, Mack Books
The Great North Road is fundamentally human, but not exclusively so. It is an ideal unity of people and places that are in constant flux, yet always interpolated with each other. The fragmentation of the road as Graham has presented it evokes the fragmentation of our own human experience; consider how our notions of identity, self, and ego serve to unify our otherwise fragmentary experience of ourselves. And the foreboding silence of the various landscapes—the bright red poppy field crowded by an oppressive grey sky, or the tall grass burning ominously in North Yorkshire—demands an acknowledgment of our relatively diminutive human position in the scheme of nature.
Just as the road itself exists in an egalitarian relationship to the other elements in the compositions, humanity and its environment exist in an egalitarian relationship to each other. Or at least, I contend, it is this leveling of a hierarchical relationship into an equitable, symbiotic one for which Graham is quietly arguing in his work. In this way, he manages to show us both what is and what ought to be at the very same time.
A1 – The Great North Road can be purchased here, and more of Graham’s work can be viewed here.
