Paul Graham — Empty Heaven

Published on the occasion of the 1995 exhibition Paul Graham: Empty Heaven -- Photographs from Japan 1989-1995 at the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany. In these visceral photographs Paul Graham scrutinizes the scar tissue of contemporary Japanese society. He identifies a collective amnesia still obscuring, decades after the end of WW II, the memory of unconditional surrender and total defeat. At the same time he scrutinizes the benevolent and polite surfaces of Japanese culture that mask the power structures underlying it.