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Saturday, 23 April 2011 01:08

Paul Graham: Smoke and mirrors

The past comes tumbling in . . . untitled, Belfast, 1988, from the New Europe series. The past comes tumbling in . . . untitled, Belfast, 1988, from the New Europe series. Photograph: Paul Graham

Paul Graham's exhibition at London's Whitechapel gallery is filled with people who are just looking. We observe their rapt attention, their lostness, absorbed in things that we can't see. They stare at TVs beyond the frame, their faces caught in the glow of the screen; they look out of cafe windows, distracted by the passing traffic. They wait in dole offices whose grimness is an insult to the eye.

In the corners of nightclubs, people stand with their eyes closed, engulfed in music, or booze, or drugs. In Belfast, a woman squints at the smoke from the cigarette she's dragging on. A pensive Galician girl casts her eyes downwards in Vigo. People stare at the pavement. They gaze at the floor. Wretched walls return their vacant looks. Sometimes they don't seem to see the world at all, their thoughts engaged elsewhere. We see their interiority and distraction, but cannot penetrate it. Sometimes they see nothing because they really are blind.

Sometimes we are blinded, too, and the picture goes almost blank, too full of glare for us to see. There's something going on in there, but the detail has been blanched out. This is a whited-out view of America, black neighbourhoods bleached to the point of erasure, just like the affliction visited on everyone in José Saramago's 1995 novel Blindness, in which Graham discovered a telling affinity with his own work. Made between 1998 and 2002, American Night juxtaposes these over-exposed images with over-rich, colour-saturated shots of sturdy homes in affluent suburbs, and often shadowy shots of black people on America's streets. As a photographic essay, American Night is as much conceptual as it is social critique, as perversely poetic as it is observational.

It is difficult not to regard all of Graham's projects as metaphor, not least for the photographer and his subject, for engagement itself: looking at photographs and at the world; looking at other people looking, seeing and not seeing. The camera sees more than the photographer – or rather, it sees something different. We see with the mind more than the eye, while the camera itself is only an eye, wherever the photographer directs it. When I look at Graham's photograph of the view from the bridge over the Archway Road at Highgate in north London, I see things from my past that Graham can't possibly know, and which aren't actually in the picture. The past, and your own life, comes tumbling in.

The same is true of the wretched pictures he took in employment offices during the early 1980s. I have sat in at least two of these self-same DHSS offices, waiting for my number to be called. Graham waited, too, not only to take sly shots, but to sign on himself. Beyond Caring remains Graham's best-known series; laminated versions of these photographs were toured by the old Greater London Council to TUC conferences in order to lobby MPs for better conditions in these desolate waiting rooms and interview booths. They remain often appalling and dehumanising places, for claimants and staff alike. But there's more to Beyond Caring than social documentary and observation, or even political commitment or outrage against Thatcherism. There's a terrible emptiness in them, a blight that goes beyond the economic.

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