Alongside Mik‘s new work we are happy to present a selection of photographs from Paul Graham‘s series Beyond Caring. The series is an early work of Graham from the mid 1980s, in which the artist introduced color photography into the genre of black and white dominated social documentary photography.

While Mik‘s works are presenting conscious stagings of social and political contexts, Paul Graham‘s work Beyond Caring documents images of British social reality in the mid of the 1980s. This series of color photographies pictures the depressing atmosphere of British employment and welfare offices. Most of those photographies were taken covert. The low focus point of camera and the fleeting lines it evokes underline the tristesse which the ones waiting here are subjected to. With this work, Graham introduced color photography into the otherwise mainly black and white dominated genre of social documentary photography. With this, he pulled his subjects into the immediate present. Published as a book in 1986, the series Beyond Caring became a pamphlet against Thatcherism.