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From Sandra S. Phillips’ article on photographs by Ken Graves from the Bay Area, 1963-1974:

Graves respected the surprises you could find in a camera, revealing the turbulence of the period in unassuming, even humorous ways. He walked the streets and found the hilarious courtly encounter of two businessmen in the city’s financial downtown. He went to nearby county fairs and air shows and saw oddities at the edges of his frame—a plane that looks like it’s falling perilously from the sky, an opened pair of scissors on a horse’s back. He was sensitive to the riotous strangeness of suburban living—the kids at a parade doing backflips just next to the open door of an ambulance; the poodle with a human hand on its chest, seated in a cavernous conference center, facing a proper, bespectacled woman at a nearby table. Beneath the funniness, though, there is an odor of anxiety and, frequently, of military presence. Graves’s love of the oddities he saw was matched by his understanding of a culture in turmoil. His modest pictures are refreshing documents of an uneasy time, rich in incident and humanity.

Read the original article

Browse work by Ken Graves and Eva Lipman at ClampArt