British photographer Paul Graham’s series American Nights highlights ‘social fracture’ in a genre-defying part-portrait, part-landscape, part-documentary portrayal of the imbalance in American society.

Forty-six of the images are washed-out, almost white images depicting African-Americans, solitary figures set in drab urban landscapes, barely visible in their faded worlds.  The figures are wandering or waiting in wide, empty concrete vistas, and to me it seems that their lack of purpose is a signifier of their lives; waiting to be noticed, to be included, in society.

In ten images, African-Americans, some physically disabled, are depicted in a low-key, underexposed manner.  The backgrounds signify inner city or poorer neighbourhoods: boarded up shops; graffiti; queuing traffic.  These images perpetuate the clichés around photographing the underprivileged: urban; poor; black; underexposed; shadowy.  In choosing to adopt this stereotype in juxtaposition with the faded images, Graham is challenging the viewer’s own ingrained assumptions about the marginalised in society.

A further seven images show large, middle class suburban houses with wide driveways and leafy plots.  All are fully saturated, with bright blue skies.  We are not given any details of the affluent occupants of these dwellings, but the assumption is that there is a  contrast following the differences in the physical appearance of the images and in the affluence versus the poverty, and thus they are white.

Thus Graham uses the saturation levels of his images to tell of the differences between the haves and have nots, rich and poor, black and white.  African-Americans are shown so faded as to be almost invisible or shadowy, defined by gritty poverty.  Against these depictions, the houses of the affluent stand out garishly, their wealthy gaudy and tasteless, ostentatious in their saturation.  The series is also a demonstration of how landscape photography can be blurred with portraiture to make comment on aspects of human society.

An issue that I would like to make an image about would be food miles and provenance.  I have been always been fascinated when travelling overseas with how different other countries look from the air even in Continental Europe the vegetation and colour of  the ground can be quite contrastive to our own.  Now we have Google Earth we can readily view this even more extensively.  My idea would be to spend some time researching the origin of different food, particularly fruit and vegetables, and produce some images by photomontage or layering of the kind of environment that food was grown in.  In the UK if we imagine where our food is grown at all it would be an idealised pastoral view of idyllic fields and orchards and I think that showing an entirely different type of landscape would encourage people to think about their food in a way that glancing at the name of a country on a food label perhaps does not.

References:

https://www.paulgrahamarchive.com/americannight.html [accessed 1 June 2020]

Bright, S. (2005) Art Photography Now. London: Thames and Hudson

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/paul-graham-2337/blinding-white [accesses 1 June 2020]