Paul Graham: Troubled Land

Huxley-Parlour are delighted to announce Troubled Land, an exhibition by renowned British photographer Paul Graham, opening at our Maddox Street gallery in January 2025. The exhibition will present Graham’s disquieting photographs, made between 1984 and 1986, documenting the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Troubled Land innovatively framed the conflict through the country’s landscapes and daringly subverted the traditions of British documentary photography.

‍

Graham avoids explicit representations of violence in these images. The photographs initially appear to depict prosaic towns: rain-soaked, common-place settings with rolling hills below cloudy skies. It is not until closer inspection that a viewer discovers, for example, a kerb painted with the Irish Tricolour, or a Union Flag flying atop a tree. In one seemingly mundane seaside image, a viewer follows the diminishing lines of a road, and discovers the unsettling scene of a road-side stop-andsearch. These vignettes are fragments of one volatile, violent, and bitter whole. All is the subject of dispute, and Graham’s images reveal how the ‘Troubles’ permeated the entirety of both rural and urban life in Northern Ireland.Land itself becomes partisan in these photographs. Tension is brought to a pitch by the everpresent notion of ‘territory’, though human figures never form the main subject matter. Troubled Land, therefore, exists in ambiguous ground between documentary and landscape photography. The effect of this blend of genres is one of a pathetic fallacy: the landscapes themselves speak of their political allegiances. Here, the fraughtness and unease of political and cultural conflict are expressed through the land itself.

‍

Much of Graham’s technical approach to this series was both bold and contentious. To many of his contemporaries, the use of colour photographs for a project of this nature lacked seriousness. British documentary photography had until then been almost entirely confined to monochromatic images, making Graham’s panchromatic project a pioneering example of what was soon to come in the genre. However, the photographer’s compositions reveal him to be the heir of his predecessors in British documentary photography. Framing is simple, and functional; low horizon lines marry with sloping diagonal lines; perspective is repeatedly used to construct the images. Graham simultaneously offers quiet and sober innovations: colour remains subdued and descriptive; photographs are largely devoid of human figures, and the sinister silence that hangs over the hills, roads, and towns is emphasised. Troubled Land is a uniquely laconic, haunting depiction of war.