#165 CAMERA Book Review: Paul Graham - Mother

An insight into the mind of Paul Graham through a lovely series of images of his mother with his latest book Mother.

Paul Graham’s first major body of work since 2014’s Does Yellow Run Forever? contains portraits of his elderly mother sitting in her chair in a retirement community in England. Graham’s camera hardly moves, with his mother asleep, eyes closed, in almost every image. Our palette is the gentle tones of old age―a flowered blouse, a pink or lavender cardigan―the light comes from a single daylight window, soft, natural, and constant. With little attempt to photographically ‘entertain’ us, we begin to notice subtle shifts of carefully chosen focus, from one eye to another, to a loose thread on a button or a stray wisp of hair. Frozen in time, the fraying of life is expressed through modest details. Powerful emotional resonance arrives through tender observation. Mortality and the slow unravelling of late old age is the principal subject here, but there is also a duality at the core of these images: as we teeter between life and death, child and parent reverse roles―the watched-over becomes the watcher, the created becomes the creator.

Embossed hardback with Japanese papers
24 x 31.5 cm,
60 pages
September 2019

Paul Graham (born 1956) is a British fine-art and documentary photographer. He has published three survey monographs, along with 26 other dedicated books.

His work has been exhibited in the Italian Pavilion of the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), Switzerland's national Fotomuseum Winterthur, and a solo exhibition at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. He was included in Tate's Cruel and Tender survey exhibition of 20th century photography (2003), and a European mid career survey exhibition at Museum Folkwang, Essen, which toured to the Deichtorhallen, Germany, and Whitechapel Gallery, London. A 2015 survey of his American work, The Whiteness of the Whale, was exhibited at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Graham has won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, the Hasselblad Award, the W. Eugene Smith Grant, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and won the inaugural Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards prize for best photographic book of the past 15 years.

Camera is on
Thank you for all your support.

#paulgraham #photobook #photography #motherhood