Photography Collection

By Richard B. Woodward
Paul Graham's 2007 photographic book project, "a shimmer of possibility," was just that: an experiment that tested how documentary-style still images, when carefully edited, provoke in the viewer the kind of narrative associations a reader might experience from a lyric poem or a short story. The literary models for this effort, he said at the time, were Japanese haiku and Chekhov's fiction. Published by Steidl as a series of 12 slim hardcovers, each bound in cloth of a different color, the ambitious project was at once lavish (the set sold for $250) and austere. No descriptions accompanied the pictures except the date and place they were taken. One of the books featured only a single image. The title itself seemed double-edged as well, as if Mr. Graham were unsure if he were leading photographers toward an iridescent dawn or merely preparing an expensive mirage. A selection from "a shimmer of possibility" is now on the walls at the Museum of Modern Art through May 12, and the results are just as tantalizing, if no more definitive. From the 12 Steidl books, the curator Susan Kismaric has chosen about half a dozen and further edited them -- eliminating some images, rearranging others, so that none of the sequences exist here as originally published.
All of the pictures were shot in the U.S. between 2004 and 2006 during more than a dozen road trips undertaken by Mr. Graham from his home in New York. The scenes from California, Louisiana, Nevada, North Dakota and elsewhere are uniformly nondescript and the people anonymous. Nothing suggests the photographer had privileged access to his subjects. They stand, sit, lie down, eat, smoke, play outdoors in spaces open to everyone -- on street corners and sidewalks, along highways, in fast-food parking lots. In one series of eight pictures, a man with an electric mower works a patch of grass back and forth along a stretch of road in Pittsburgh. A sliver of parking lot in the foreground indicates this is not his lawn but a public facility (a motel? a hospital?). Even though mowing grass is depicted here as a sweaty job, this is a man who does it with dedication. Mr. Graham's steady focus discovers a smudge of sun illuminating the man from behind and, in another picture, a sprinkle of rain in the foreground. There is irony in the pleasure gained from these natural epiphanies: They are ours, not his.
In another sequence on another wall, it's dusk in a suburb, which doesn't prevent a teenage boy and girl from playing basketball on the street until dark. Less uplifting are three other series: an expressionless woman eating chicken out of a Styrofoam container; a homeless man stretched out under a window at a Jack-in-the-Box late at night; and an overweight man taking drags on a cigarette outside an apartment complex. In one "story," of a small girl playing with her dolls alone in the grass beside a windowless building, the set of five pictures indicates that Mr. Graham moved in closer with each shot. But in general, as in a series focusing on a small market, he barely moves and lets the customers going in and out and the cars passing in front provide what little visual pizzazz there is. Since appearing at MoMA in 1990 with his countrymen Martin Parr, Graham Smith, John Davies and Chris Killip in "British Photography From the Thatcher Years," the now 53-year-old Mr. Graham has published seven books that attest to an aesthetic in which pictures are found in the world, not made in a studio. Whether or not MoMA intended this new show to be seen as an indirect homage to Robert Frank's book "The Americans," published here in 1959 and being recognized in various 50th-anniversary celebrations, the parallels between the two publishing projects are hard to ignore.

Both men traveled widely around the U.S. and photographed it as foreigners. (Mr. Frank, born 32 years before Mr. Graham, came here from Switzerland.) Neither has claimed to represent the breadth of the country but instead offered highly personal reactions to the American scene. Both trained their lens on the dispossessed -- almost all of Mr. Graham's subjects are from the lower economic rungs -- and both conceived their projects in opposition to photographic trends of their time. Mr. Frank set himself against the lacquered glamour of fashion photography and the moralist simplicity of photojournalism. His book was as open-ended as it was downbeat. Mr. Graham, by reaffirming the values of street photography as perfected by Mr. Frank and others, has rejected the tendency among many artists of his generation to make what he calls the "Great Photograph" -- wall-sized prints designed to overwhelm viewers with their detail, enormousness and summary opinions.
As he told me in a 2007 interview, "photographers have been trying for years to make bodies of work where images work together to build up a coherent statement." One of his models is Robert Adams, who photographs his edge of the American Northwest one tiny piece at a time. "It's not about one great picture by Robert Adams," Mr. Graham said. "It's about 20 or 30 pictures that form a sensitive, intelligent reflection of the world. It's the same with Garry Winogrand or Robert Frank." The ratio of success to failure in "a shimmer of possibility" is not yet equal to that achieved in Mr. Adams's books, much less in Mr. Frank's classic. Mr. Graham has the advantage of digital technology in taking his photographs and editing them on a computer. But his stories seldom evoke the thwarted emotions found in Chekhov. Pictures of the man with the lawn mower are intercut in the book with pictures of canned goods on a store shelf. Apart from conveying a vague sense of poverty in the world, the two sets of pictures cancel rather than reinforce each another.
The effect of Ms. Kismaric's thoughtful edits, many of which clarify sequences found in the books, is to expand the narrative possibilities but also to undermine the overall value of committing the material to paper. If these images can be put together in many different, random ways, why is any one version deserving of special attention? Mr. Graham's focus on America's marginal characters is a welcome corrective to the current art-school practice of students photographing each other and their families. But his objective stance toward his subjects does not absolve him of inadvertent sentimentality, as when his photograph of a man selling flowers on the street invites comparison to the blind girl depicted in Chaplin's "City Lights" -- and the scene isn't any less maudlin if Mr. Graham concentrates on the man's hands and shoots him at night in Las Vegas. A one-volume edition of the 12 books with essays is due out this spring. Perhaps then the full dimensions of Mr. Graham's achievement will be clear. His audacity and intelligence already are.
Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.