Description
Contact Sheet 99 features the work of David Graham.
Until I had begun to seriously work on this exhibition and catalogue my tendency was to pigeonhole David Graham as just an accomplished chronicler of roadside America. But what I have come to realize is that for more than twenty years he has been recording the scenes of a mobile America looking for meaning at the crossroads of kitsch and culture, past and present, and fantasy and reality — and has indeed given us a portrait of a country that refuses to fit, like himself, into neat categories.
Jeffrey Hoone
Executive Director, Light Work
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David Graham considers his photographs environmental portraits — people in their homes, on the job, celebrating, playing. These photographs explore cliches, contradictions, myriad nuances of form and meaning, and innumerable personal histories, all within the context of life in North America. Graham does not attempt to simplify or to generalize about the quality of this life, but to illuminate the diversity underlying the modern trends toward a homogeneous culture. He suggests, “They are portraits in the largest sense because, the individual, whether visible in the picture or not, permeates the space. The photographs provide visual testimony about the relationships of people to their environments and to one another.”
Graham received a photographers fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has exhibited his work at the Jeffrey Fuller Fine Art in Philadelphia, PA, and Armstrong Gallery, NY, among others.
