Verdigris / Ambergris completes a twelve-year suite of works by Paul Graham
focused on life's transience and our mortality. This pair of sibling books is
centered on people scanning the infinite horizon as they look out over land
(Verdigris) and sea (Ambergris). Interleaved with these contemplative portraits
in the first volume are images of cherry blossoms and in the second images of
the setting sun. These photographs are made respectively in a park overlooking
post-industrial New Jersey, in which Graham has worked for the past seven years,
and along the northern coast of Long Island, where there is a long tradition of
watching the setting sun. Graham takes these archetypal objects of natural
beauty – and their observers – to form a layered examination of the ways we see
and experience the beauty of the world. While the portraits of
horizon-watchers are captured with golden-hour clarity, the interleaved images
in each volume have been corrupted through the process of their creation. Tea
blossom images in Verdigris are captured on a digital camera set to an
ultra-resolution mode that uses multiple micro-shifted exposures. But disturbed
by the gentle motion of a breeze, the camera struggles to assemble a coherent
representation. Meanwhile the saturated sunsets of Ambergris result from a
camera that is uniquely able to collect color information at every pixel site,
rather than approximate color from nearby pixels. Pushed beyond its limits, the
images become stained with artifacts of the overwhelming intensity of
information. With this dazzling new series, Graham embraces the flaws of his
tools to evoke the transience of life, its bountiful wonder, and the degradation
and demise inexorably bound to beauty. [Verdigris is the green patina of
oxidised copper, as found on the Statue of Liberty. Ambergris is a rare and
enigmatic product of whales, sought by beachcombers and highly valued in
perfumery.]
