Paul Graham: Roundabout, Andersonstown,
Belfast, 1984, colour photograph, 68 x 87.5cm; courtesy
the artist and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; click
on the image to see an enlarged version of it
On 30 January 1972, soldiers from
the British Army's 1st Parachute Regiment opened fire on
unarmed civilian demonstrators in Derry. Thirteen people
were killed and a similar number were wounded. The march,
which was called to protest internment, was illegal according
to the British authorities and the government-appointed
Widgery Tribunal exonerated the soldiers of any guilt. After
mounting pressure on both sides of the Irish Sea, an official
inquiry into what actually happened that day was opened
in 1998 under the custody of Lord Saville. It continues
even now, more than thirty years after the shootings. Alongside
the bombings in Dublin and Monaghan, Enniskillen and Omagh,
the tragedy of Bloody Sunday has come to be seen as a defining
moment in the history of the Troubles.
The British photographer Paul Graham
first visited Northern Ireland some twelve years after Bloody
Sunday, provoked by a niggling sense of injustice at how
the political and military situation was being handled in
the province, only to return with pictures no different
from those that regularly adorned the national press on
the mainland. Towards the end of a subsequent visit, Graham
was stopped and searched by an army patrol, irritated by
his presence on the Andersonstown estate on which they were
operating. In Ulster, the armed forces have a profound distrust
of photographers who have an annoying habit of being in
the right place at the wrong time. Graham was released after
questioning and advised against taking any more pictures.
However, as the patrol was moving away into the middle distance,
Graham contrived a hurriedly taken photograph with the camera
positioned against his chest, pointing the lens at the rapidly
dispersing soldiers. Back in London, he found in that one
image the solution to all his aesthetic frustration. "It
wasn't how you were supposed to frame the action in those
situations," he confesses. "I wasn't close up.
I hadn't zoomed in on any incident, things were distant
and scattered. I'd returned the action to its context. It
broke many unwritten rules [of documentary photography]."
1
Paul Graham: Union Jack flag in tree, County Tyrone,
1985, colour photograph, 68 x 87.5cm; courtesy the artist
and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; click
on the image to see an enlarged version of it
Roundabout, Andersonstown, Belfast
was the first of more than thirty images of a strife-torn
Ulster that Graham accumulated over a two-year period that
avoided the clichés of sensationalist urban mayhem,
concentrating instead on what the photographer refers to
as the visual footnotes of the conflict. Pictorially, each
of the photographs features at least one index of the cultural
and mental attitudes that divide Northern Irish society.
Compositionally, they span two different genres: the politically
driven reportage tradition and the politically neutral aesthetic
tradition. "At first sight," Graham explains,
[the photographs] seduce
you into viewing them simply as landscapes which accounts
for people's desire to engage with them. But they're booby-trapped
and launch the viewer into another area altogether. They
play off that particular kind of sentiment which (Britons)
have for landscape - a position which engenders Constable-like
fields and Turner-like skies - against sentiments associated
with political allegiance, British and Irish. If you don't
delve any deeper, you might see only the flags, signs
and graffiti. But these symbols should also be read within
the context of the landscape in which they reside, the
Union flag in the richest and most fertile lands, the
Irish tricolour against the rockier and hillier ground.
These different layers of reading within the photographs
only come out slowly.
Paul Graham: Republican parade, Strabane, 1986,
colour photograph, 68 x 87.5cm; courtesy the artist
and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; click
on the image to see an enlarged version of it
Troubled Land, arguably
Paul Graham's most controversial body of work to date, set
itself the task of examining the condition of Northern Ireland
at a time when the Troubles were at their most turbulent.
In the 1980s, the reception it received was often clamorous.
People [were] much more divided about its worthiness
[than about previous work of mine]," says Graham,
"because the debate about Northern Ireland [was]
much more divisive. Here was I, a naive British photographer
with no special knowledge of the situation, going over
to Ulster to make work. That got a lot of people's backs
up, not just in the North, but also over here [in Britain],
people who felt that this was their territory and that
the only politically correct attitude was 'Troops Out'.
Paul Graham: Unionist coloured kerbstones at dusk,
near Omagh 1985, colour photograph, 68 x 87.5cm;
courtesy the artist and Anthony Reynolds Gallery,
London; click on the image
to see an enlarged version of it
By 1987, the year in which Troubled Land appeared
in book form, Graham had begun to sense that his approach
to photography - a cool approach that spawned a neutral,
seemingly styleless style - might profit from a degree of
revised thinking. A fellowship at the National Museum of
Photography, Film and Television in Bradford in 1989 offered
the photographer a chance to review his practice and became
the springboard for an examination of how the echoes of
local and regional history were playing themselves out across
late twentieth-century Europe.
The preface for In Umbra Res, printed
to coincide with the conclusion of the fellowship in 1990,
includes an Irish saying of unknown origin:
If you find yourself in
a dark place, without any light, and the night is upon
you, and should you try to look directly at something,
no matter how big it is, no matter that you know where
it is, you simply cannot see it. However, if you avert
your gaze from the centre, if you look to the edges, using
the corner of your eye, the periphery of your vision,
you can begin to make something out.2
Paul Graham: Graffiti, Ballysillan Estate, Belfast,
1986, colour photograph, 68 x 87.5cm; courtesy the artist
and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; click
on the image to see an enlarged version of it
Paul Graham: Untitled, Belfast, 1988 ('Religion'
graffiti in unemployment centre), 1988, colour
coupler print mounted on aluminium, 114 x 152 cm;
courtesy the artist and Anthony Reynolds Gallery,
London; click on the image
to see an enlarged version of it
'In Umbra Res' translates as 'in the shadow
of it' and the sixteen photographs in the series tackle
the problem of picturing the Troubles indirectly. Instead
of Graffiti, Ballysillan Estate, Belfast, for instance,
Graham fixes our gaze on 'Religion' graffiti in unemployment
centre; rather than Unionist poster on tree, County
Tyrone, he asks us to contemplate a Man watching
TV news report of lynching, Belfast.
Paul Graham: Unionist poster on tree, County Tyrone,
1985, colour photograph, 68 x 87.5cm; courtesy the artist
and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; click
on the image to see an enlarged version of it
Paul Graham: Untitled, Belfast, 1988 (Man watching
TV news report of lynching, Belfast), 1988,colour
coupler print mounted on aluminium, 203 x 152.5cm; courtesy
the artist and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; click
on the image to see an enlarged version of it
Troubled Land engages with its
subject surreptitiously. The social, political and cultural
tensions that Graham exposes appear in the middle-distance
or off to one side of the frame. The viewer is made to work
to find the point at which townscape or landscape come together
with the fallout from the Troubles, the locus at which the
complex layers of meaning converge. This lateralism is taken
several stages further in In Umbra Res. We only know
that the man is watching a televised broadcast of an horrific
attack because Graham mentions this in the photograph's
title. Likewise, we only recognise that the graffiti on
a telephone table is religious and that that table is in
a job centre because Graham tells us so.
In Umbra Res marks a turning point
in Graham's work, a watershed which the photographer himself
identified in an interview from the mid-1990s:
Photography is a medium with a unique and particular
link to reality. Previously there was no problem about
this, the world was out there, and you simply had to put
your camera over your shoulder and go out with an open
heart and head to observe this reality. This was the 'old
consciousness' if you like. The problem is that over the
past two decades our perception of reality has changed
from something 'out there' to something 'within us', a
blend of external, internal, past and present stimuli,
personal and collective beliefs, mediated and original
ideas...3
Troubled Land was the last group of photographs
by Graham that dealt exclusively with the veneer of the
visible world. With In Umbra Res, and the New
Europe book to which it gave rise, the photographer
argued for a more holistic, psychologically charged version
of reality - fragmentary certainly, but one that takes account
of everything we carry with us as intellectual and emotional
beings. Since Bradford, Graham has struggled to move his
profession beyond the realm of simple observation:
We need people who will bend the medium to their aims,
to use it, force it into uncharted territory, yet remain
committed to it for itself. That is where my passion is,
that is where I want to work, those are my goals. 4
Unhelpfully, the Troubles have sometimes
been portrayed as taking place in a small corner of a small
island off the landmass of Europe. By incorporating images
fromIn Umbra Res into New Europe,
Graham brought an apparently domestic squabble back into
the mainstream of political debate. The conflict that once
made of Northern Ireland the murder capital of the continent
thereby took its place on an agenda which includes the rise
and fall and rise of fascism, the rise and rise of the sex
industry, the worsening narcotics problem, the demise of
communism and the increasing hegemony of capitalism and
consumerism - the topics, in short, which present the Old
World with many of its sorest headaches.
For someone who had tried to engage
with the circumstances in Ulster for the best part of a
decade, it seemed apt to Graham that he should return to
the province in the spring of 1994 to see whether he could
generate a telling response to the fragile truce that properly
stayed sectarian killings for the first time in nearly a
quarter of a century. Hugh Stoddart says of the images produced
in the first week of that previously unimaginable cease-fire,
which were shown just once in London in November 1994, that
it is perhaps no longer an issue "amongst habitués
of contemporary art galleries that the title accompanying
a photograph is part of the artwork."5
But in the case of the nine large skyscapes that Graham
shot in the three-day cessation of hostilities, out of which
the more lasting peace of today has emerged, the importance
of titling and Graham's elliptical take on issues of socio-political
and cultural concern were pushed to their furthest extreme.
Paul Graham: Shankill, Belfast, Cease-fire April
1994, colour photograph, 112 x 142.5cm; courtesy
the artist and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; click
on the image to see an enlarged version of it
Paul Graham: Bogside, Derry, Cease-fire April 1994,
colour photograph, 112 x 142.5cm; courtesy the artist
and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; click
on the image to see an enlarged version of it
The Untitled (Cease-fire) series
depicts skies above notorious problem spots in Northern
Ireland. Some photographs show cloudless skies so pale they
seem almost white. Others reveal forbidding thunderheads.
"Walking close to these photographs," comments
Stoddart,
you see the tiny title cards contain the names of places
in Northern Ireland. Newry, border town, has a black sky,
full of storm. First jolting revision of perception! Secondly,
each piece is subtitled 'Cease-fire, April 1994'. Second
jolt! Suddenly, we read these images with a powerful additional
layer of meaning. These immaculate prints, these stunning
skies are suffused with feeling... When the cease-fire
was announced, Graham went back (to Northern Ireland)
and turned his camera upwards. It's a simple yet brilliant
thing to have done. No borders up there. No images of
death and destruction. Rather, the sky is an emblem of
freedom, and of renewal (rain and sun) and eternity -
a dimension against which the suffering might one day
seem to have been a mere blip of misery. The longer I
spent in the presence of these pieces, and let the names
(Shankill, Ballymurphy, Bogside, Newry) roll through my
mind, the more moving I found it.
Of course, we can never be quite sure that Graham photographed
each of his skyscapes during the course of that historic
cease-fire. Nor will we ever know whether they were taken
where they say they were. All that has to be taken on trust.
But then again so, too, do the promises that all sides are
now making in trying to find a decisive solution to the
region's ills. As Graham has said, those three days in the
mid-1990s are probably the most significant in the whole
history of the Troubles. "Momentous times can be tranquil,"
he points out. "[And] peace is beautiful."
Paul Bonaventura is the Senior Research Fellow in
Fine Art Studies at the University of Oxford and a Visiting
Scholar at the New York Academy of Art.
Footnotes
1. Unless
otherwise indicated all quotations by the artist are taken
from Paul Bonaventura, Paul Graham: The Man with the
Moving Camera, Artefactum, XI/51, March 1994,
or from an unpublished correspondence with the author
2. In Umbra Res, National Museum of Photography,
Film and Television, Bradford in association with Bradford
and Ilkley Community College and Cornerhouse Publications,
Manchester 1990
3. Empty Heaven: Photographs
of Japan 1989-1995, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and Scalo Books, Zurich 1995
4. Ibid.
5. Hugh Stoddart, Paul Graham,
November 1994 (unpublished)
Paul Graham's work is included in Cruel + Tender:
The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph at
Tate Modern until 7 September and at the Museum Ludwig in
Cologne from 29 November until the end of February 2004.
American Night, an exhibition of Graham's
new work, goes on display at the Power House, Memphis, from
20 September 2003, PS1/MoMA, New York from 12 October 2003
and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London from 16 October 2003.
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