“But Still, It Turns,” the title photographer Paul Graham chose for the excellent show he curated at New York’s International Center of Photography (through May 9), is a muttered remark attributed to Galileo after he was forced to recant his research proving the Earth revolved around the Sun. He was right, of course, but scientific truth has tangled with dogma and denial ever since. For Graham, the quote signals a preference for down-to-earth work–pictures grounded in observation, not imagination. His subtitle is “Recent Photographs from the World”–a place that has been all but ignored in so much contemporary conceptual and constructed photo work.
His exhibition brings together seven photographers and one collaborative pair, all of whom work in the social landscape tradition best exemplified by Graham himself and dominated in recent years by Alec Soth. Although not all the photographers were born there, the United States–its people, homes, highways, and social life–is their subject. But this is not American the Beautiful or any version of our self-congratulatory, increasingly delusional national myth, and the mood is more anxious, wary, and despairing than celebratory. Still, if the show is downbeat, it’s never pessimistic, only clear-eyed and engaged.
Graham calls the approach “post documentary”–a new sort of concerned photography that’s free of the constraints and demands of editorial photojournalism and as a result more personal, more nuanced, and typically made with a book, not a magazine, in mind. Writing about his own early experience with photography in the exhibition’s catalog, Graham says “it showed me that there were, in fact, ways to find some sense of 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 see and embrace the storm.”
Each of the photographers in his show have found their own pathway. Vanessa Winship’s brought her from the UK to the US in 2011 and 2012. Her black-and-white pictures, all uncaptioned, were taken on several cross-country jaunts. Asked about the picture above, she didn’t say where she found this young couple, only that Latham, on the left, had met Bethany online and had “come from Chicago to live together with Bethany’s parents to see if they could make their relationship work in the world beyond cyberspace.” She notes that Latham wears a foxglove hand puppet, the only accessory in the couple’s fastidiously minimal outfits, but makes no assumptions about their sexual identity, so, perhaps, neither should we. “They were two young people hoping to make a connection,” Winship writes. Judging by their expressions, their gestures, and their mirroring style of dress, they’ve found it.
Vince Aletti is a photography critic and curator. He has been living and working in New York since 1967. A contributor to “Aperture”, “Artforum”, “Apartamento” and “Photograph”, he co-wrote “Avedon Fashion 1944-2000”, published by Harry N. Abrams in 2009, and is the author of “Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines”, published by Phaidon in 2019.