画家为母亲画像在艺术史上非常受欢迎——惠斯勒、弗洛伊德，塞尚，霍克尼，英格里斯，高更和杜勒都画过自己的母亲，他们的母亲画像直白地近乎残酷，并且都强调了“即使是最小的皱纹和血管也不能忽略”。这是自2014年的《Does Yellow Run Forever?》之后，保罗•格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）的**部重要专著，书中包含他年迈的母亲的坐在英格兰退休社区的椅子上的肖像照。Artists drawing or painting their mother has become iconic in art history—from Whistler through Freud, Cezanne, Hockney, Ingres, Gauguin or Durer, whose brutally honest portraits of his mother insisted that ‘Even the smallest wrinkles and veins must not be ignored’. Paul Graham’s first major body of work since 2014’s Does Yellow Run Forever? contains portraits of his elderly mother sitting in her chair in a retirement community in England.

Graham’s camera hardly moves, with his mother asleep, eyes closed, in almost every image. Our palette is the gentle tones of old age—a flowered blouse, a pink or lavender cardigan—

the light comes from a single daylight window, soft, natural and constant. With little attempt to photographically ‘entertain’ us, we begin to notice subtle shifts of carefully chosen focus, from one eye to another, to a loose thread on a button or a stray wisp of hair. Frozen in time, the fraying of life is expressed through modest details. Powerful emotional resonance arrives through tender observation.

Mortality and the slow unraveling of late old age is the principal subject here, but there is also a duality at the core of these images: as we teeter between life and death, child and parent reverse roles—the watched-

over becomes the watcher, the created becomes the creator.