Listen to Claudia Rankine on whiteness and the photography of Paul Graham.
June 3, 2020, 2:19pm
Listen to Claudia Rankine read her essay “Open to Arrival“ about the Paul Graham photograph, “Woman with Arms Outstretched (Memphis),” 2000.
“Does a photograph reflect the moment before the moment realized in the title? I am beginning to wonder if ‘outstretched’ is a way of saying yearning. Perhaps then, the white haze enacts his own struggle to see what the American landscape renders invisible.” Perhaps Graham’s picture “mimics the blankness of the white gaze when confronted with the black figure.”
Written for the anthology Looking Writing Reading Looking – Writers on Art from the Louisiana Collection (2019). Created by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Copenhagen.
