©Paul Stein, from Nothing Is Revealed

I was pleased to meet with Paul Stein ( http://paulsteinalibis.com Please note that the website is being rebuilt) at the Month of Photography Denver Portfolio Reviews.  He brought an extensive diptych project, Nothing Is Revealed, that showcased his street and travel work. This collection of men, dressed up or down, resting or moving, working or waiting is an acknowledgement of lives unknown, but fully seen. Each diptych is carefully chosen to echo something within each of the two images, and by joining the photographs, we are given a narration and a story without a beginning or end.

Paul Stein studied photography with Nathan Lyons at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, from 1971 to 1973. From this meaningful experience, he continues to apply an appreciation for visual thinking and the extended frame, as practiced through the sequencing of images (for asking how and why one image leads to the next). In addition to making photographs, he has also made sculptures, furniture, and jewelry. But photography has been the true artistic through line for his life.

The other part of his life, beyond the artistic, has been dedicated to human rights, refugee resettlement, and community integration. He chose to make this more his career than his photography. He has been a national consultant to immigration attorneys on asylum documentation and expert testimony, the executive director of a torture treatment center, the Colorado State Refugee Coordinator, the president of the national State Coordinators of Refugee Resettlement, the cofounder and executive director of nonprofit organizations dedicated to community navigation and microenterprise for refugees and immigrants, and most recently the producer of the New American Neighbors project for videos in thirteen languages with actionable information for refugee families.

©Paul Stein, Nothing Is Revealed

Nothing Is Revealed

These images are from an extended project (and book prototype) called Nothing Is Revealed, which explores individual journeys of discovery across multiple decades and destinations. Reflecting myself, this project considers only men, who uncharacteristically pause in unheroic moments of vulnerability, and who face possibilities rather than certainties. We regard these men looking and failing to look, wondering if they have seen something that we have missed, or missed something that we have seen, but concluding that we have all not seen what matters most. At the end of the journey, nothing is revealed.  

To the extent that identity is now centered in photographic projects, the identity that resonates most for me is that of the flâneur, the urban stroller who navigates his environment through a personal aesthetic and philosophy. The visually consistent and coherent observations of the flâneur are most closely associated with the practices of street photography, a tradition in which I feel most grounded.

A sequence of images can be coherent and dissonant at the same time. This is a project of directional moments rather than decisive moments. Every image carries the imprint of other images it is moving from or towards. These are quotidian moments that radiate out into narrative possibilities. The images capture the stillness before or after action, but not the action itself, signifiers searching for significance.

©Paul Stein, Nothing Is Revealed

My process is accretion in reviewing my color photographs from nearly forty years. There is an inherent tension regarding the intent of these images, between forward-facing art and backward-facing artifacts. The changing locations suggest equivocal contexts rather than confirmational travel. Memory becomes performative as it links images separated by time and space into a new presentation in the present, and as it creates diptych dialogues that explore the ambivalence in searching and the illusion in discovery. The diptychs amplify the pacing and sequencing of the images, which range from the whimsical to the serious stations of this journey. 

While each individual pair has its own consistency and cohesion, the sequencing of one pair next to another also creates resonances and an overall forward progression that serves a narrative purpose. The images of the pair would be adjacent in a book or an exhibition. However, the images are still printed separately to emphasize that each image has its own history and meaning, which are amplified and modified by the performance of memory in the present to pair the images.

©Paul Stein, Nothing Is Revealed

©Paul Stein, Nothing Is Revealed

©Paul Stein, Nothing Is Revealed

©Paul Stein, Nothing Is Revealed