Thinking Analogically

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Trastevere, Rome (1959) © Henri Cartier-Bresson Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos body, and the visible world all fall into perfect alignment. One of the most important photobooks of the 21st century, Paul Graham’s A shimmer of possibility, is built on another kind of transposition from the realm of literature to photography. Though not explicitly based on the content of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov’s short stories nor attempting to illustrate them, Graham discovered in them a model for observing the world with a camera. He wanted ‘to reflect Chekhov’s openness, his simple transparency,’ by ‘similarly isolating a small rivulet of time.’ In the same way that Chekhov would carry on writing about a woman combing her hair for multiple pages, Graham’s photographs linger on equally banal moments with a pressing clarity. ‘Photography is the vehicle through which we learn to think analogically,’ Kaja Silverman writes. There are aspects of photography that are very clearly like other things we encounter, and vice versa – not so much because they appear similar, but because something fundamental to them seems to correspond despite all the superficial differences. By encountering these ideas outside of the context of photography, White, CartierBresson, and Graham found in them a free-floating concept, detached from any specific object. They thought in terms of analogy and application, bringing those ideas into photography by adapting them to serve their own particular methodologies. And when they did, the medium of photography itself expanded.

— Alan Huck