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THE HASSELBLAD FOUNDATION is pleased to announce British photographer Paul
Graham as the recipient of the 2012 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in
Photography for SEK 1,000,000 (approximately GBP 95,000, US$150,000), The
award ceremony will take place in London on March 8, 2012. An exhibition of his
work, Paul Graham - 2012 Hasselblad Award Winner will open on October 26, 2012
at the Hasselblad Center at the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden, in
connection with which, one or more seminars will be arranged with the award
winner.

The Foundation’s citation regarding the decision to award the 2012 prize to Paul
Graham is as follows:

Paul Graham is one of the most brilliant photographers of his generation. During the
course of his nearly 40-year career, he has presented an extremely focused body of
work, at once perfectly coherent and never monotonous. In images both sensitive and
subtly political, he makes tangible the insignificant traces of ?the spirit of the times? we
do not normally see. With his keen awareness of the photographic medium, he has
constantly developed innovative forms of working with all aspects of photography. This
makes him a profound force for renewal of the deep photographic tradition of
engagement with the world.

This year’s award committee, which submitted its proposal to the Foundation’s
board of directors, consisted of:
• Clément Chéroux (chair), Photography Historian, Curator Department of
Photograpy, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France,
• Ekaterina Degot, Art Historian, Art Critic and Curator, Moscow, Russia
• Ute Eskildsen, Professor, Head of the Department of Photography and Vice-
Director, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany.
• Gao Shiming, Curator, School of Intermedia Art, China Art Academy,
Hangzhou, PR China,
• Roberta Valtorta, Scientific Director, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea,
Milan, Italy.

Paul Graham is a British photographer, born in 1956 and living since 2002 in New
York. He is a member of the generation of photographers who emerged in the UK
during the Thatcher era. From this point of departure, the traditional black and
white social documentary style, his work evolved toward colour in the early 1980s.
In the mid-1980s, Graham had his breakthrough on the international scene with a
series entitled Beyond Caring, colour prints about conditions at the unemployment
offices. With great insight into this situation, these photos display people queuing
in the grimy offices of the job centres and the endless hours spent in waiting
rooms, with their depressing conditions.

Between 1984 and 1986, Graham completed a series concerning the Northern
Ireland conflict. Entitled Troubled Land, this book depicts the disputed territory
through recognising small-scale actions carried out by political activists in the
public arena: a flag hanging from a tree, graffiti on a billboard, a pavement painted
in the Unionist colors.

The two subsequent decades, were a remarkably productive period for Graham.
Most of his work from this time can be found in the volume which made a real
mark in history of photography: New Europe, published in 1993. It is a perceptive
depiction of his take on the late twentieth-century European Community. Television
Portraits, begun in 1986, is a work in progress, focusing on the light the television
screen creates and the bodily responses it dictates. In another work, Graham turns
his keen perception on nightlife portraits of the generation who were facing the
new century. These large scale colour prints were published in 1999 as End of an
Age.

Graham and his generation of photographers understood perfectly the importance
of books in the development of their oeuvres. He uses the book as a fully-fledged
medium. The latest of his major publications, A Shimmer of Possibility, is an
excellent example of his mastery of the editorial dimension of photography.
Published in 2007 by Steidl, it is a mind-blowing twelve-volume collection. The
photographs in A Shimmer of Possibility were taken all over the United States, and
are divided into groups of between two and ten photographs each. With great
attention to detail and a sense of dramaturgical sequence, these photos depict
anonymous people in their everyday surroundings.

In interviews, Graham often highlights his interest in the finely-chiseled narrative
technique of the great Russian author Anton Chekhov, and there is a clearly
Chekhovian dimension in Paul Graham’s work. A Shimmer of Possibility was voted
as 'Most important photographic book of the past 15 years' at the prestigious Paris
Photo event in 2011 - a real achievement, given the incredible range of
photography books that have appeared over the past decade and a half.

Graham has - and surely this is what makes him such a multifaceted artist - total
command of the medium he is using, stretching from the original photograph to
the final arrangement of the images. In certain of his works there is a notable
experimental dimension. For instance, in his latest series, entitled Films, he has
scanned blank frames from his archives of celluloid, magnifying images of the raw
film emulsion so as to show the filigree grain and structure of the film itself, in a
quiet homage to the wonderful celluloid medium that is entwined with
photographic history.

Over his career, Graham has developed an elegant, lyrical style of photography,
which subtly combines social consciousness and political commitment, as well as
providing a nuanced reflection on the nature of photography itself. He thereby
participated in the redefinition of the European documentary tradition in
photography, and brought a significant influence to bear on a whole new
generation of photographers.