Paul Graham:Troubled Land
22.01 – 01.03.2025
Upcoming
Hours
Monday to Saturday
10:00 am – 5:30 pm
Gallery
45 Maddox Street
London
W1S 2PE
Huxley-Parlour are delighted to announce Troubled Land, an exhibition by renowned British photographer Paul Graham, opening at our Maddox Street gallery in January 2025. The exhibition will present Graham’s disquieting photographs, made between 1984 and 1986, documenting the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Troubled Land innovatively framed the conflict through the country’s landscapes and daringly subverted the traditions of British documentary photography.
Graham avoids explicit representations of violence in these images. The photographs initially appear to depict prosaic towns: rain-soaked, common-place settings with rolling hills below cloudy skies. It is not until closer inspection that a viewer discovers, for example, a kerb painted with the Irish Tricolour, or a Union Flag flying atop a tree. In one seemingly mundane seaside image, a viewer follows the diminishing lines of a road, and discovers the unsettling scene of a road-side stop-and-search. These vignettes are fragments of one volatile, violent, and bitter whole. All is the subject of dispute, and Graham’s images reveal how the ‘Troubles’ permeated the entirety of both rural and urban life in Northern Ireland.
B. United Kingdom1956
Biography
In 1981, Graham completed his first body of work, A1 – The Great North Road. The series of colour photographs captured life along England’s ageing arterial road, the A1. The pioneering series went on to receive critical acclaim, and was followed by Beyond Caring (1984-1985), which was a visual record of unemployment in Britain under Thatcher, and Troubled Land (1984-1986), which depicted landscapes in Northern Ireland during the years of the Troubles. Graham’s use of colour film in the early 1980s, at a time when British photography was dominated by traditional black-and-white social documentary, had a revolutionising effect on the genre.
Graham has since gone on to produce over 12 further bodies of work that include New Europe (1986-1992), Television Portraits(1986-1990), Empty Heaven (1989-1995), Ceasefire (April 1994), End of the Age (1996-1998), Paintings (1997-1999), American Night (1998-2002), a shimmer of possibility (2004-2006), Films(2011), The Present (2011), Does Yellow Run Forever? (2011-2014), and Financial Landscape (2017-present). Graham has produced dedicated monographs to nearly every series of work, his most celebrated, perhaps, was his twelve-volume collection, a shimmer of possibility, created in collaboration with steidlMACK. The book won the 2011 Paris Photo Book Prize for the most important photography book published in the past 15 years.
Paul Graham was born in the UK in 1956. Paul Graham’s work has been the subject of more than eighty international solo exhibitions. Works from Graham’s series Paintings were included in the exhibition, Plateau of Humankind, as part of the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. In 2011, a twenty-five year survey of Graham’s work, Paul Graham: Photographs 1981-2006, was held at the Museum Folkwang, Essen and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Graham has been awarded a number of prestigious awards, including the Hasselblad International Award for Photography (2012), the Royal Photographic Society Award, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (both 2009) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010). His works in held in the collection of Arts Council of Great Britain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Tate Gallery, London and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
He lives and works in New York.