Edition : First / London / Mack / 2012 / Hardcover. / Near Fine 4to, 104pp. Cloth boards. Numerous Colour plates. Text in English.
“In honour of the 2012 award, the Hasselblad Centre in Gothenburg, Sweden is showing an exhibition, together with this book 1981 & 2011, which unites Graham’s first published work A1 – The Great North Road (1981) and his latest The Present (2011). Edited by Paul Graham in collaboration with Dragana Vujanovic and Louise Wolthers from The Hasselblad Foundation, the book links this thirty-year span, together with an essay written by David Campany, author, curator and artist. At the beginning of the 1980’s Graham was among the first photographers to unite contemporary colour practice with the classic ‘social documentary’ genre. In 1981/2 he completed A1 ‘ The Great North Road, a series of colour photographs from the length of the British A1 road, which forged a dramatic challenge to the black and white tradition that dominated British photography to that point. This work, along with his other photographs of the 1980’s, were pivotal in reinvigorating and transforming photographic practice in the UK and abroad. In 2011 Paul Graham released The Present, which embraces street photography, a genre unique to photography where the artist works with the ceaseless flow of life. These images break with the traditional approach of locking the world into frozen instants and instead brings us each scene together with its double, the briefest fraction of time apart, so that we glimpse the continuum, the before/after and coming/ going of life’s dazzling dance.”
