GRAHAM, Paul - Mother

Background information

"Artists drawing or painting their mother has become iconic in art history—from Whistler through Freud, Cezanne, Hockney, Ingres, Gauguin or Durer, whose brutally honest portraits of his mother insisted that ‘Even the smallest wrinkles and veins must not be ignored’. Mortality and the slow unraveling of late old age is the principal subject of the series 'Mother' by Paul GRAHAM, 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." (pubisher's note, © Mack Books, 2019)

Content

Paul GRAHAM’s first major body of work since 2014’s book 'Does Yellow Run Forever?' contains portraits of his elderly mother sitting in her chair in a retirement community in England. The camera of the Britsih Hasselblad Award recipient 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.

Book reviews

"The photo book 'Mother' by Paul GRAHAM is [...] an exploration of old age as a kind of hinterland, a suspended state in which the world shrinks to the size of a room and consciousness fragments. Throughout, Graham’s patient, painterly approach demands and repays attentiveness, and one’s eye is drawn inevitably to small details." (© Sean O'Hagan, in: The Guardian)
"Paul GRAHAM...reveals his care and their tender relationship in a sharp-focused portrait." (© Financial Times Weekend Magazine)

About the British photographer, Paul GRAHAM (b.1956)

Photo books by Paul GRAHAM