After four years of living in a world filled with notions of “post truth,” we have witnessed shared objective standards crumble before our very eyes, resulting in a highly factionalized society. Invariably, this extension of the postmodern project would expand beyond discourse and into art with “post documentary” becoming a new way of thinking about photography, one which curator Paul Graham embraces in the new ICP exhibition and MACK book, But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography From the World.
.
For Graham, who first fell in love with what he describes as “serious photography” in the mid-1970s, the medium offered a semblance of order in an otherwise chaotic world. Documentary photography could ground us in place and time, offering guidance, insight, compassion, and understanding — helping us make sense of that which might otherwise be unfathomable. But what it wasn’t, and could never be, was fashionable.
.
Graham laments the art world’s marginalization of the documentary form without bringing to bear the political underpinnings such a position holds. Rather he focuses on the fact that, “It is difficult to make really meaningful work from life.” But nothing of value comes easy; for documentary photographers, the challenge of presence, intimacy, trust, mutuality, and awareness are heightened by a profound lack of control over their subjects.
.
.
