2006-2014
1996-2006
1988-1996
1981-1986
 
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ICP Exhibition Curated by Paul Graham
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Belonging Particles
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
Robert Penn Warren
I'm writing to you in the future.
Here, now, we are in the depths of the pandemic, but if you are reading this, then the book and exhibition have happened, which means life has begun to return, and you are able to look beyond the walls of your home, to be part of the world again. That, in turn, gives hope to us, back here in your past - the thought of you reading these words is a promise, sealed by your eyes reading this. Time binds us.
That this book is about photography and the act of seeing the world, becomes more relevant, as it too operates like that - it takes something from the here, the now, and sends it forward to the future. A gift of sight, an offering of generosity sent onwards. The prospect that someone might value these images, gives hope to the artists who struggle with visualizing the world, with seeing through the fog of the present. In turn, that you, here, now, came to view these images, to consider and maybe even to value the work you are holding in your hands, is a gift to these artists, as they endeavor to articulate something of what our lives amount to.
So here we sit, isolated, unable to engage with each other, with life, but reaching forward to you, in the future, in the hope that this is not in vain, that these words and images will find a home, where you are now. Take care of our gift, it is a tender offer, made with sincerity and hope.
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Somewhere our belonging particles
Believe in us. If we could only find them.
WS Graham
In 1827, Robert Brown looked through his microscope at some pollen floating in water, and noticed their random jostling and erratic motion, it was clear and repeatable, but he could think of no explanation for what was causing it. It wasn't till 1905, when a young physicist named Albert Einstein published his doctoral paper A Kinetic Theory of Gases, on the nature of 'Brownian Motion', as it had become known, which posited that the erratic jiggling and stuttering of small particles, their stochastic movement, was caused by the actions of atoms. In short, it was proof that invisible particles, the elemental components of life, which we couldn't perceive, existed.
What has this to do with photography? Well, it has always seemed to me that a lot of our difficulties as sentient beings comes from the randomness of life, our inability to perceive sense in the world and our interactions with it. We are left with feelings of confusion and powerlessness that this unpredictability creates, our lives tossed about by capricious events outside of our control. The inexorable universe, where everything dissolves to entropy, is an unforgiving place.
When I fell in love with serious photography, in the mid 1970s, it showed me that there were, in fact, ways to find some sense to the world. Photography, the simple act of looking, taking note of what you perceive, with sincerity, openness and integrity, allowed a kind of pathway through the cacophony - a way to embrace the storm. It could guide you through the randomness, and grant the simple mercy of recognising life in all its prismatic wonder.
There was Eugene Atget in Paris and August Sander in Germany; Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and their colleagues during the depression era 20's and 30's USA, Gordon Parks and Robert Frank in 1950s USA reflecting inequality - freedom and bondage - as it lay plainly before them. Lisette Model and Diane Arbus, who traced in people the forces that shaped or misshaped their lives. There was Garry Winogrand, whose Public Relations gathered up the whole 1960-70s mirror maze into a work of crystalline beauty, clear eyed in a time of enraged blindness. There was William Eggleston spiraling across the south towards Jimmy Carter's hometown in Georgia on the eve of his Election. There were the great photographic artists of Japan, Fukase with his Ravens and Kawada with his Map, there was the great David Goldblatt in South Africa, there were Chinese, African and South American photographic artists, too many to name, scattered but linked, across the world. All and each of these revealed that it was, in fact, possible to navigate life, if you only cared to really see, that you could transform random particles into belonging particles.
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Our title, 'But Still, It Turns' comes from what Galileo reputedly mumbled under his breath as he left the 1616 Inquisition, having been forced to recant his observations of the world. (Note that: a scientist, having to adjust his discoveries to the politics of the time!) When this exhibition was first suggested, it was a title that struck me as especially apropos for photography from the world. It has, of course, become dramatically more pertinent since then, in these quarantine times. A note of reassurance, a reminder that life will continue: but still, it turns.
As someone who has been in love with the photographic medium for over 40 years, it sometimes feels that the heart of photography, images from the world-as-it-is, have been marginalised, as museums and galleries, MFA courses, Biennale's and festivals, push it aside in favor of constructed, conceptualized and staged imagery - artworks where the artist crafted something in their mind, or in the studio or in the computer, according to the strengths or weakness of their imagination. Photography that did not fit into this was siloed as 'Documentary' or 'observational'.
The reasons for this pendulum swing, the shift away from the world, are many fold; the moods and misunderstanding of a unique artform by the artworld; the way that major museums now often follow the galleries rather than lead them; and the lack of understanding of the photographic book as a vital artform in its own right, as well as a reservoir to discover exciting new artists.
Having said that, we do have to acknowledge that some of this is photography's fault, and a good look in the mirror is often salutary. We can see for ourselves that simplistic work, and cut-and-paste projects added nothing to the artform, or our understanding of life, or develop the medium. There is also the simple fact that it is difficult to make meaningful work from life. This is true in many mediums, but especially with one that works with a component outside of its control, like photography, where the primary material is an uncooperative, recalcitrant world.
Then there is the fact that the act of taking a photograph is so easy, so effortless, that the endeavor is viewed as merely 'observational', and passively reactive. Great photography often retains a simplicity and casualness about it that defies analysis or taking seriously.
A line may take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught
Yeats
To some viewers, the artists' work presented here, with its tributaries and eddies, its non-sequiturs and perambulations, its lack of drama and prize-winning moments, will mean it does not appeal. They wish to be surprised or entertained. But art's deepest role is not to entertain. Entertainment is a byproduct of art. It is not the purpose of art.
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The position of photography from the world in the 21st century world has changed. The artworld's embrace has been selective and partial, a lucky few fly high, the rest kept to the margins, at least until history clarifies the chatter. Photographers traditionally had other outlets for their work, but over the past few decades the scenery changed dramatically around that. Traditional forums like magazines and visual periodicals have shrunk or shuttered, the internet grabbed images for free, and the uses & outlets for photography have diminished to a fraction of what they were. Photography's reproducibility, its ability to visualize an editorial feature was both a great strength and its' Achilles heel. That it could be illustrative and functional, was useful, but it was not all it could be.
Is this challenge a calamity, or an opportunity? For sure, lost was a vital source of support and income, as well as a platform for wide exposure that allowed the work to be disseminated, but, but... also lost was the constraints, the binding of images to editorialized narratives, to a form that fitted into some a-priori conception of how things need to be, how the world could be squeezed into magazine pages and digestible themes - how it would be explained by, or illustrative of, a sequence of words. But maybe we are looking at this the wrong way, for if you invert the thinking, then with the demise of all this, comes a great unshackling - a freedom from editorializing, from narrative arcs, from packaged 'projects'.
I think a lot of filmmakers think a story is the purpose of the film, and the characters and the actors really have got to service the story and take it to where it is going. And that seems to me to be the complete opposite of what should be happening because there should be no story. I mean, we spend our lives inventing stories, but the story actually doesn't exist. We exist, and our apprehension of a story is how we explain the kind of meanderings that we take. So there is no such thing as the empirical story - it's just what happens to people.
Bill Forsyth
There is hope. Just as cinema in the 'aughts was affected by digital technology, and came under a tsunami of special effects with Terminators, Hobbits and Superheroes, yet had its Sokurov's and Campion's, its Makhmalbef's and Malick's, working with layers of reality and a love of a medium that was every bit as much theirs as Hollywood's. So we have our photographers who care about the medium and the world, who keep the heart of photography vital and alive. Life is not fashion shoots and lifestyle features, entertaining as they might be, so we must value artists who work directly with life, providing they do it intelligently and sensitively.
It is this liberation, this emancipation, that these artists have, consciously or not, reacted to, and embraced. There is a sense a freedom in this work, an openness to traverse genres, boundaries, people and places, avoiding the self censoring limitations that bind our vision of the world, and those lives cradled within it.
But what do we have to replace narrative, to replace the story? In Olga Tokarczuk's novel Flights, the author suggests that "Constellation, not sequencing, carries truth". Which feels like a good proposition for these gatherings of images. Each artist here works with scattered places and lives, earthly facts and chance collisions, history and its shadow, to form or echo some kind of interconnectedness. They refuse to yield to life's randomness and clutter, but struggle to give shape to the world, the straighten the disarray, to reveal the fine web that binds us to each other, to this time, to existence.
There is no didactic story here, no theme or artifice. None is asked, none is given. This photography is post documentary, released from restrictive briefs and reductive narrative within which places and people are all too conveniently shuffled. Talented artist know when to leave the poetry of the world alone. No editorializing, no words to illustrate or be explained by: that there is no singular story is the story. These artists tell us that all is in play, that everything matters. Here is a freedom, hard-won, sometimes confusing, but nonetheless, genuine: a consciousness of life, and its song. If there is one lesson, it is that all the world’s infinite consanguinity lays here—each of us and all of this exists in the fulsome now.
Paul Graham
NYC, 2020
Foreword to But Still, It Turns.
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