Paul Graham states in his introductory essay: “struggle with seeing through the fog of the present”. Like fog today, contemporaneity is something extremely complex and changeable. It is deleterious to seek a restitution of its universal meaning, legible and understandable to most, through a filter of generalizing vision. It would only flatten and give even more enamel to a superfluous and insufficient generalization of a complex and articulated reality. Today’s world is made up of macro realities, niches and subcultures that hybridize every day with the others. How then can we see through the blanket of fog of the present which today seems to be a nebula for all intents and purposes? How can photography today, in the midst of its post-digital rebirth and often still in search of itself, give us an idea of the world in a present overload of images? The answer lies in a Robert Warren macro restitution approach; the individual works of the artists collected in “But Still, It Turns” emerge as synthetic and authorial glances on the contemporary world. The specificity of each individual work is able to fill the arduous task of being able to restore a unique and restricted dimension, making it perceptible in a universal and timeless plane.
The structure of the book edited by Graham goes beyond leading to a narration of manipulated or constructed images for a subjective interpretation of life and today’s society, but rather does the exact opposite. The images collected here manage to go beyond the canonical and today undervalued documentary value as they go beyond the idea of documentation itself in its purest exception, bringing fundamental innovations in language, content and restitution.
The works of the artists, through the skilful curation of Graham, are able to return the nuances of a photographic methodology that is born and researched through the scrupulous attention to the knots and tangles of life. Paul Graham suggests us that the world we live in is the most precious source of inspiration we will ever find. The concrete example is today’s period. The pandemic crisis has reshaped the social and human life arrangements worldwide. An “extraordinary” period that has destabilized and remodeled every social form we have firmly established. The world therefore can and must still be a resource from which to draw.
The images collected in the book give shape to a constellation of works that we are inclined to define, at first glance, documentary style, but which in fact, as Graham himself affirms, is “real photography”. With this definition we find an important and conscious stance by the British photographer. In fact, he has orchestrated a structure of images that unfold and disengage from the classic idiom of documentary photography.
They don’t tell a photographic story, they don’t have a privileged editorial message to expose. The work of the artists involved is much more cryptic and ambiguous. It does not seek definition. It does not want to surprise. It tries to be a photographic practice that comes straight from the world. No artifice.