The Post-Documentary Photographers Who Care about the World

There are no big crowds or large gestures in But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography from the World at the International Center of Photography in New York, which brings together the work of nine photographers to illuminate, as if by aleatory spotlight, corners of the United States in everyday endurance. Instead, the mood is quietly contemplative, a muted melancholy settling over the show like a light fog.

But Still, It Turns—what Galileo reportedly said upon the church’s rejection of his most famous theory—was planned before the pandemic but held until this February. If the exhibition feels prophetic, you might attribute that to the tricks of time. If it feels a bit random, that is no accident, writes curator and photographer Paul Graham in the stylish catalogue, published by MACK. “To some viewers, the artists’ work presented here, with its tributaries and eddies, its non-sequiturs and perambulations, its lack of drama and prize winning moments, will mean it does not appeal,” Graham writes in his essay-manifesto, framing the exhibition as a corrective for what he identifies as the “pendulum swing” of esteemed fine arts photography—“shift[ing] away from the world” in its preference for “constructed, conceptualized and staged imagery.”

Graham, a celebrated English photographer, has eighteen monographs and three survey books to his name, including his 1983 portrait of a Britain in industrial decline under Thatcher in A1: The Great North Road (republished as part of a trilogy this spring, also by MACK) and A Shimmer of Possibility, a twelve-volume look at everyday life in the US. In But Still, It Turns, he brings together “photographers who care about the medium and the world, who keep the heart of photography vital and alive” and whose work “give[s] shape to the world, to straighten the disarray, to reveal the fine web that binds us to each other, to this time, to existence.”

Literature has, among other art forms, seized on formal fragmentation to illustrate contemporary experience, and Graham invokes Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s notion that “constellation, not sequencing, carries truth.” With But Still, It Turns Graham seeks a photographic equivalent, celebrating each artist’s work as post-documentary, post-narrative: “no editorializing, no words to illustrate: that there is no singular story is the story.” Ian Penman’s catalogue essay takes up the literary form, a scrapbook of reflections interspersed with quotes from other writers and thinkers, and the show includes photobooks as “profound art works in their own right.” Six of the featured photographers’ books, along with a handful of other recent photobooks by artists whose work is not exhibited (including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zora J Murff, and Carolyn Drake), are under glass at ICP and illustrated at the end of the catalogue, giving a sense that, with more space, these artists might have been included in the show.

All the photos in But Still, It Turns were taken in the US, many of them sometime during Obama’s second term or Trump’s early presidency. They are united as the works of astute artists using their cameras to lift the veil—without the flourish of a magician or morgue attendant—on an unequal and troubled country. There are moments of joy and tenderness, but overall the mood is quiet and contained.

By embracing the freedom left by the Internet’s erosion of magazine editorials and their narrative imperatives—“no didactic story here, no theme or artifice,” Graham writes—But Still, It Turns equates an oblique, observational aesthetic with sincerity, even truth. That there is no singular story is indeed the story of perspective. Separately, many of the works featured are strong. But I left ICP with a feeling of suggestive absence more than presence. The melancholic fog never parts.

This absence is most literal in the empty streets of Emanuele Brutti and Piergiorgio Casotti’s Index-G (2016–18), which takes as its subject racial segregation in Saint Louis (the title refers to the Gini Index, a statistical measure of inequality). The series documents the invisible barrier between the 95 percent Black zip code north of Delmar Boulevard, where life expectancy, the wall text tells us, is sixty-seven, and the 70 percent white neighborhood just south where life expectancy is eighty-two. The color photographs taken along the boulevard (one might think of Graham’s A1)—mundane scenes including an American flag, brick walls, an auto repair shop, boarded up storefronts, a nail salon—are shown in jarring juxtaposition with black-and-white portraits of Black Americans and the interiors of vacated home. The absence of the neighboring white residents poses the question: How best to confront whiteness—by picturing it directly, or refusing to give it more time centerstage?

Some may see prescience in these deserted streets. The word is used frequently these days to make sense of the déjà vu of inheritance—of this country’s history building on its own logic. Isolation, alienation, and racial violence are exacerbated by the experience of living with a global pandemic, but they are not novel. Perhaps prescience describes inevitability, further exposed.

America’s recent confrontations with its own brutality, historical and contemporary, have been notably visual—from the videos of police murder of civilians that ignite uprising as well as conversations about spectacle and the ethics of picturing both atrocity and protest, to monument toppling, efforts to memorialize slavery, and more. Inseparable from social movements for material equity—the interconnected struggles for just housing, education, and healthcare, environmental justice and the redistribution of resources, the abolition of police and prisons—is the question of how we see: ourselves, each other, the world.

Photography has a tendency to reinforce the inequity and violence it reveals and, in some cases, claims to dismantle. In a world dominated by Big Tech, our distrust of photographs is met with further reliance on them. Some photography responds directly or self-referentially to anxieties about how technology affects how we see and who we are, addressing themes such as surveillance and saturation; circulation and manipulation; appropriation and the algorithm; democratization and democracy.

The term “post-documentary” has described many things, including a photography that examines these issues of authenticity and power. It now frequently refers to a poetic or ambiguous style whose meaning or message is not overdetermined. A suggestive rather than more overt aesthetic dominates But Still, It Turns, but the images that linger are the ones that most clearly wrestle with the tensions central to the form.

RaMell Ross’s South County, AL (a Hale County) (2012–20) offers glimpses of intimacy, mediated by the thick air of history. Faces are often partially or fully obscured: a little girl wearing a yellow dress and yellow barrettes crouches behind a flowering bush; another’s softly smiling eyes—both mischievous and shy—peer over the seat in front of her in an otherwise empty school bus. The catalogue notes “a strategic ambiguity” in Ross’s images “that speaks of a pursuit not to frame somebody, to grant them the full dignity of selfhood and perhaps unknowability.” Akin to Édouard Glissant’s notion of the “right to opacity,” Ross’s images are numinous in their respect for the untraversable boundaries of individual perspective.

In 2009 Ross moved to Hale County, Alabama, where he taught photography and coached basketball for many years, using his lens to represent the community while working to free his own perspective. Ross’s own catalogue essay for But Still, It Turns, also fragmentary in form, is a kind of dialogue that shifts between the imperative (“Disautomate the consumption of blackness” and “Consider the indecisive moment.”) and analysis (“If blackness/form is unstable and evolving then the ideas of structure and narrative must evolve correspondingly to accommodate. The site of the image in a time-based chain of interpretation must remain fertile.”).

“To be black is the greatest fiction of my life,” Ross has said. “Yet I’m still bound to its myth. I can’t help but think about . . . how the myth of blackness aged into fact and grew into laws . . . How it became the dark matter of the American imagination.” One might think of James Baldwin on the twin myth—or “moral choice”—of believing oneself white; in “On Being White . . . and Other Lies” (1984) he writes that those who “think they are white,” “who believed that they could control and define Black people[,] divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.” What might it mean to learn to see again, to define oneself—to imagine—anew?

In Vanessa Winship’s she dances on Jackson—a series taken across the US in 2012, and one of the more classical documentary approaches in the show—faces are on full display: open, porous, guarded, seeking. But these are fleeting moments of intimacy, poignant and enigmatic. In one portrait, a father and son in suit-and-tie stand outside a public building—the son elevated by the curb and gently holding the older man’s earlobe between his fingers, the father pigeon-toed and leaning slightly into the gesture. They look away in opposite directions, this moment of sweetness between them, both finite and infinite, sealing the tableau.

Winship’s black-and-white portraits seem to be in conversation with Curran Hatleberg’s light-soaked color narratives in Lost Coast (2014–16)—pictures of warmth and uncertainty in a struggling post-industrial California town—though it’s unclear exactly what is being said beyond a collective, quiet making do. Meanwhile, Gregory Halpern’s ZZYZX (2008–16)—a colorful and carnivalesque, mystical and semi-fictional chronicle in the Mojave Desert—and Kristine Potter’s Manifest (2012–15)—black-and-white portraits of landscapes and lone men in unnerving repose—are also kindred despite their strikingly different styles; both invoke the surreal in their play with the pageantry and brutality of American myth and westward expansion.

“We know that a photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the various eras of its subsequent rediscovery,” Rebecca Bengal writes in her catalogue essay. In Richard Choi’s What Remains (2011–20), short videos of everyday life—a mother praying with her children, a woman winding a clock—jolt with the sound of a camera’s shutter as a still photograph (framed beside the video) is made, the moment plucked from time. Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s All My Gone Life (2014–18)—the artist’s own images from those years mixed with prints of archival negatives he purchased on eBay—are arranged on two stories of the exhibition’s central wall. Some are so small or hung so high as to be frustratingly less legible than others, emphasizing not only the fallibility of perspective but also the distorting passage of time—history’s hold on our vision.

“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time,” John Berger wrote. Ross’s Academy Award-nominated film Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)—which is screening at the ICP— follows two young men, Daniel and Quincy, to convey a sense of their community without the imposition of a confining narrative. About midway through, there’s a beautiful scene where sunlight streams through trees and smoke as it rises in wisps and blooms—a daytime bonfire burning nearby an old plantation house. Accompanying this everyday fever dream is Ross’s impromptu conversation from behind the camera with a local who’s curious about why he’s filming; we hear bits and pieces about Ross’s project—“We need more black folks making photos in the area and taking pictures,” he says—and the man’s grandson’s scholarship, the dialogue a part of Ross’s practice: “participate, not capture; shoot from not at.” The question “What happens when all the cotton is picked?” then fills the screen preceding a 1913 clip of Black American actor Bert Williams in blackface—the true breaking of the fourth wall. (Filmmaker Garrett Bradley also incorporates footage from Lime Kiln Club Field Day, the earliest surviving feature film with a Black cast, into her 2019 installation America, recently on view at MoMA.)

Ross’s film is a reimagining of what it might mean to represent Blackness and the South. But it is also a freeing of perspective more generally, by way of working with and within its inevitable constrictions—of the physical, the individual, and of time. It is artful and open, demanding and free. This possibility is what the post-documentary round-up of But Still, It Turns urges us to see.

But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography from the World is on view at the International Center of Photography, New York, through August 15, 2021.