BUT STILL, IT TURNS – EXHIBITION AT THE INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY NEW YORK

Works include:

Vanessa Winship’s peripatetic vision in she dances on Jackson, which presents a conversation between landscape and portrait, exploring the vastness of the United States and the inextricable link between a territory and its inhabitants.

Curran Hatleberg’s gatherings of humankind in Lost Coast’s intimate portraits and episodic narratives that reconstruct a sense of place and community through a shifting cast of characters and scenery.

Richard Choi’s What Remains, which pairs video and still photographs to offer a meditation on the stream of life and its expression as a single image, between film and photography, between life and our memory of it. 

RaMell Ross’s South County, AL (a Hale County), which presents images that center on the rhythms and flow of Black lives, embracing quiet spaces and quotidian moments where people are pictured away from the burden of representation, granting them dignity of selfhood. The exhibition also includes screenings of his Academy Award–nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018). 

Gregory Halpern takes viewers on an enigmatic journey westward, across the desert and through the city of Los Angeles, ending at the Pacific Ocean in ZZYZX, where everything unfolds into a kind of rapture—simultaneously psychedelic, self-destructive, and sublime.

Piergiorgio Casotti and Emanuele Brutti’s collaborative Index G examines the city of Saint Louis through its streets, homes, and people, demonstrating how inequality is revealed through profound differences in local businesses or living conditions, as well as seemingly arbitrary details within urban surroundings.

Kristine Potter’s Manifest, which combines the genres of landscape and portrait photography to re-examine the canon of traditional western landscape photography, and in so doing uncovers a world far more formidable and disorienting than previously detailed. 

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s All My Gone Life, which braids contemporary images made by the artist across the United States with archival negatives; together they ask how the image, and the imagination, might play into the elaboration of a future in which vision and delusion so frequently overlap.  

“This photography is ‘post documentary’,” said Graham. “The work in But Still, It Turns grapples directly with the world around—nothing staged, constructed, or dramatized. The show contains a principled refusal of photography that only pursues ‘prize-winning moments.’”

“But Still, It Turns reminds us that a quieter photography—one that reflects its makers’ deep empathy—is thriving in our fragmented cultural landscape and particularly charged times,” said David Campany, ICP Managing Director of Programs. “We’re so pleased to offer Paul and this incredible cohort of photographers the platform to share their moving work as we mark the anniversary of the first year in our new space."

Paul Graham has played an essential role in dissolving the barriers between the worlds of documentary and fine art photography. Starting in the early 1980s, Graham’s use of color in the role traditionally occupied by black-and-white documentary was a radical challenge to the unwritten rules of engaged photography. Troubled Land (on the Northern Ireland conflict) and Beyond Caring (addressing unemployment in the time of Margaret Thatcher) shifted the debate on how such issues could be visually articulated. With an extraordinarily long and active career of four decades, Graham has published eighteen monographs and three survey books. He moved to New York in 2002, and has worked in the United States since then. Most notably, a shimmer of possibility was published as a set of twelve books and presented as a solo exhibition at MoMA, New York. He is represented by Pace Gallery in the United States, and galleries in London and Berlin.