Gallery 339 339 S 21st St PA19103 Philadelphia États-Unis
From January 17 through March 15, 2014, Gallery 339 is pleased to present Thirty-Five Years / 35 Pictures, an exhibition by David Graham, which offers one photograph from each of the past 35 years, starting in 1979. 1979 was the year that Graham acquired and began using an 8x10 view camera. It was a turning point for the artist, changing the way he photographed, and setting him on an American sojourn that has lasted for more than three decades.
David Graham is part of an increasingly small number of photographers who don’t approach their art in tightly circumscribed terms; each picture is not part of a discrete, highly conceptualized project. In Graham’s case, this has allowed him to develop a body of work that is as immense and varied as its subject—American individualism, as expressed in our idiosyncratic, chaotic and remarkable environment and citizenry. The challenge for an exhibition that tries to summarize Graham’s work is the very scope and scale that make it so exceptional. Where to begin? What to include? How to knit together this considerable photographic oeuvre in a coherent manner without resorting to an exhibition comprised of the best-known pictures? Thirty-Five Years / 35 Pictures does feature well-known images, but we imposed the one-picture-per-year strategy to both gain control over the work and to force decisions that we might not typically make. And so it has. Given that it’s a single picture from each year, many classic pictures had to be let go in favor of others that have received less attention over time. Sad as we were to lose some images, this approach has brought forward several outstanding and underappreciated ones; it has also yielded interesting new relationships among pictures that have never found themselves near each other (either in exhibitions or books). Ultimately, we’ve tried to at least hint at the depth and breadth of this exceptional chronicle of America.
Graham’s photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the U.S., including the International Center for Photography in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, the Delaware Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Graham has produced several books, including Alone Together, Declaring Independence, Ay! Cuba, Taking Liberties, American Beauty, and Land of the Free. His work has been collected by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and The Art Institute of Chicago. Graham currently resides in Newtown, Pennsylvania, though as evidenced by his work, he remains in constant motion, traveling throughout the country and developing his complex portrait of the American experience.
