¹ Graham, Paul, quoted in Chandler, David, “Consciousness Breathing,” in Graham, Paul, The Whiteness of the Whale (London: MACK and Pier 24, 2015), 21Google Scholar.

² A combination of topographical, typological and phenomenological approaches is at work in Graham's previous different bodies of work. It could be argued that topographical dimensions are more prominent in his first books, A1 The Great North Road (1983) and Troubled Land (1987), while phenomenological and typological dimensions are more in the foreground in Beyond Caring (1986), In Umbra Res (1990), New Europe (1993), Empty Heaven (1995) and End of an Age (1999). With regard to Graham's dialogue with European and American history of photographic experimentation see Chandler, David, “A Thing There Was That Mattered,” in Graham, Paul, Paul Graham, Photographs 1981–2006 (Göttingen: steidlMACK, 2009), 19–62Google Scholar; Wilson, Andrew, “History and the ‘Thinking’ Photographs,” in Graham, Paul, Paul Graham (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 1996), 38–103Google Scholar; Russell Fergusson, “The Moment before and the Moment after,” in Graham, Paul Graham, Photographs 1981–2006, 121–26.

³ Williams, Val, “Paul Graham: American Night,” Portfolio: Contemporary Photography in Britain, 38 (Dec. 2003), 32–40Google Scholar.

⁴ Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, quoted in Graham, Paul, American Night (Göttingen: Steidl MACK, 2003), 1Google Scholar.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Paul Graham, video interview recorded by Pier 24 in the context of The Whiteness of the Whale exhibition (2015), at http://pier24.org/video/paul-graham-the-whiteness-of-the-whale.

⁷ Paul Graham, “Interview with Paul Graham, September 3, 2015,” interview conducted by Pier 24 in the context of The Whiteness of the Whale exhibition (2015), at http://pier24.org/interview-with-paul-graham.

⁸ Paul Graham, interview by Allie Haeusslein, “Paul Graham on The Whiteness of the Whale at Pier 24 Photography,” Aperture Foundation blog, 28 Oct. 2015, at https://aperture.org/blog/exhibition-paul-graham-whiteness-whale-pier-24-photography.

⁹ Williams, 40.

¹⁰ Graham interview by Allie Haeusslein.

¹¹ Chandler, The Whiteness of the Whale, 21, original emphasis.

¹² Benveniste, Emile, Problèmes de linguistique générale, Volume II (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 79–88Google Scholar.

¹³ Certeau, Michel de, “Walking in the City,” in de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988), 98Google Scholar.

¹⁴ See the numerous studies devoted to the subject since Searle's, J. “What Is a Speech act?” in Black, Max, ed., Philosophy in America (London and Ithaca, NY: Allen & Unwin and Cornell University Press, 1965), 221–39Google Scholar (de Certeau's footnote).

¹⁵ De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97–98, original emphasis.

¹⁶ Ibid., 99.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid., 100.

¹⁹ The overall structure and layout of American Night is presented in Graham, Paul Graham, Photographs 1981–2006, 334–39.

²⁰ Karen Rosenberg, “Roadside Reflections on Your Land, My Land,” New York Times, Art Review, 5 Feb. 2009, at www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/arts/design/06grah.html.

²¹ “Interview with Paul Graham, September 3, 2015.”

²² About the concentric dimensions of American cities see Burgess, Ernest W., “The Growth of the City,” in Park, Robert E., Burgess, Ernest W. and McKenzie, Roderick D., eds., The City (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 47–62Google Scholar. See also Alonso, William, “The Historic and Structural Theories of Urban Form: Their Implications for Urban Renewal,” in Blunden, J., Haggett, P., Hamnett, C. and Sarre, P., eds., Fundamentals of Human Geography: A Reader (London: The Open University Press, 1978), 147–50Google Scholar. For an economic perspective on this question see Harvey, Jack and Jowsey, Ernie, Urban Land and Economics, 6th edn (London: Palgrave, 2003), 160–61Google Scholar.

²³ Mumford, Lewis, The City in History (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt, 1961), 33–34Google Scholar.

²⁴ Geddes, Patrick, Cities in Evolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1915)Google Scholar.

²⁵ Mumford, 540–41.

²⁶ “Yet the continued expansion of the metropolis into the formless megalopolitan conurbation, and the multiplication and extension of these conurbations reveal the depth of the plight every society now faces.” Ibid., 553.

²⁷ Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 123–24Google Scholar, original emphasis.

²⁸ Alan Berger notes that “one of the earliest examples of this characterization was published in 1958 by the editors of Fortune magazine. Originally appearing as a series of articles in 1957, The Exploding Metropolis is one of the early post-World War II volumes to document urban growth as chaotic, disorderly, unnatural, and problematic.” Berger, A., “Discourses for Landscape and Urbanization,” in Berger, Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006)Google Scholar, reprinted in Larice, M. and Macdonald, E., eds., The Urban Design Reader, 2nd edn (London and Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 546–57, 546CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Ibid., 546.

³⁰ Ibid., 547. In his definition of liminality, Berger makes reference to Turner, Victor W., The Ritual Process (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1969), 94Google Scholar.

³¹ Berger, 547.

³² Ibid.

³³ Lefebvre, Henry, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991)Google Scholar. Soja, Edward W., Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996)Google Scholar.

³⁴ Soja, Edward W., Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 4Google Scholar.

³⁵ Soja, Postmetropolis, 241–42.

³⁶ Chandler, The Whiteness of the Whale, 20.

³⁷ In particular, urban and spatial divisions were the main focus of research of the Chicago School of Urban Ecology in the early decades of the twentieth century (Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth), a strand of research that continues to the present. See, for instance, Harvey, David, Social Justice and the City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009)Google Scholar; the numerous works by Wilson, William Julius, as, suchThe Truly Disadvantaged: Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar and When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1996), amongst others. See also Cross, Malcolm and Keith, Michael, eds., Racism, The City and The State (London and New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar; and Massey, Douglas S. and Denton, Nancy A., American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

³⁸ National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Final Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), quoted in Soja, Postmetropolis, 266.

³⁹ Harris, Fred R. and Curtis, Lynn A., Locked in the Poorhouse: Cities, Race, and Poverty in the United States. (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998)Google Scholar. See also Curtis, Lynn A. and Harris, Fred R., The Millennium Breach: Richer, Poorer and Racially Apart (Washington, DC: 1998)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Soja, Postmetropolis, 265–322, original emphasis.

⁴¹ Abel, Elizabeth, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), xviiGoogle Scholar. On the relationship between space, place and politics see, for example, Soja, Edward W., Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989) 119–20Google Scholar. See also Keith, Michael and Pile, Steve, “Introduction, Part 1: The Politics of Place,” in Keith and Pile, eds., Place and Politics of Identity (London: Routledge, 1993), 1–21Google Scholar; and Warf, Barney and Arias, Santa, eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar.

⁴² On the poetic and political ramifications of the notions of exposure and visibility with regard to the representation of a population and of a people see Didi-Huberman, Georges, Peuples exposés, peuples figurants (Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2012), 11–34Google Scholar.

⁴³ Aaron Schuman, “The Knight's Move: In Conversation with Paul Graham 2010,” SeeSaw magazine, at www.seesawmagazine.com/paulgrahaminterview/paulgrahaminterview.html.

⁴⁴ “Interview with Paul Graham, September 3, 2015.”

⁴⁵ Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 123–24.

⁴⁶ Chandler in Paul Graham, Photographs 1981–2006, 54.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 55–56.

⁴⁸ Chandler, The Whiteness of the Whale, 20. For a study on the representation of whiteness in art history and Western media see Dyer, Richard, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk (London and New York: Penguin Random house, 1996), 1Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Winant, Howard, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 25–38, 39–49, 50–68Google Scholar.

⁵¹ It is worth noting that the definition of “exceptionalism” is closely associated with “the theory that the peaceful capitalism of the U.S constitutes an exception to the general economic laws governing national historical development.” Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd edition, revised (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 603.

⁵² Graham describes them: “White, overexposed, quite difficult to see images of the poor, which snap and contrast into these full color pictures of delightful new middle-class homes in the desert of California.” Graham, video interview recorded by Pier 24.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Chandler in Paul Graham, Photographs 1981–2006, 55.

⁵⁵ Ibid.

⁵⁶ Graham interview by Allie Haeusslein.

⁵⁷ Chandler in Paul Graham, Photographs 1981–2006, 57.

⁵⁸ Agamben, Giorgio, “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle,” in Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000), 75Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Paul Bonaventura, “Blinding White,” Tate Magazine, 7 (Sept.–Oct. 2003), 26. Williams, “Paul Graham: American Night,” 40.

⁶¹ On this question see Davies, Mike, The City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Pimlico, 1998) 151–219Google Scholar; Blakely, Edward J. and Snyder, Mary Gail, Fortress America (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997)Google Scholar; MacKenzie, Evan, Privatopia: Homeonwer Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Dumm, Thomas L., “The New Enclosures: Racism in the Normalized Community,” in Gooding-Williams, Robert, ed., Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993) 178–95Google Scholar; Soja, Postmetropolis, 282–22.

⁶² Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid.

⁶³ “Interview with Paul Graham, September 3, 2015.”

⁶⁴ On the fact that the African American poor have been trapped in the deindustrialized inner city see Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged; Wilson, When Work Disappears; also Harris and Curtis, Locked in the Poorhouse.

⁶⁵ This “double consciousness” is a state of duality, in which African Americans are forced to live, “one ever feels his twoness, – An American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Du Bois, The Soul of Black Folk, 5.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 9–10.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 5.

⁶⁸ Chandler, The Whiteness of the Whale, 20.

⁶⁹ Ibid.

⁷⁰ Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003)Google Scholar, see in particular the lectures delivered on 21 Jan. 1976, 60–62; on 28 Jan. 1976, 65–84; and on 17 March 1976, 239–63.

⁷¹ Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 241. It is worth noting, however, that the power to kill remains nonetheless widely exercised through the death penalty.

⁷² Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” Agamben, Means without End, 3–4, original emphasis.

⁷³ Giorgio Agamben, “What Is a People?”, in Agamben, Means without End, 31.

⁷⁴ Chandler in Paul Graham, Photographs 1981–2006, 55.

⁷⁵ Giorgio Agamben, “What Is a Camp?”, in Agamben, Means without End, 41.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 37.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 39.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 41–42.

⁷⁹ Chandler in Paul Graham, Photographs 1981–2006, 56.

⁸⁰ “Interview with Paul Graham, September 3, 2015.”

⁸¹ Agamben, Means without End, 41–42.

⁸² Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa points out the relevance of these cases in the context of Barack Obama's presidency. S. Wolukau-Wanambwa, “Constallations,” in Graham, The Whiteness of the Whale, 182–83. On the origins and developments of the #Black Lives Matter movement see Lowery, Wesley, They Can't Kill Us All: The Story of Black Lives Mattert (Boston: Little Brown, 2016)Google Scholar; Coates, Ta-Nehisi, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015)Google Scholar; Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (New York: Verso, 2016); Davis, Angela Y., Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a movement (Chicago and New York: Haymarket Books, 2015)Google Scholar; Abu-Jamal, Mumia, Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017)Google Scholar.

⁸³ Arendt refers to Bertolt Brecht's poem “To Posterity.” Arendt, Hannah, Men in Dark Times (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt, 1968)Google Scholar, Preface, vii. See also Didi Huberman, Peuples exposé, peuples figurants, 26.

⁸⁴ Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” in Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 4.

⁸⁵ Chandler, The Whiteness of the Whale, 21. On the painful but necessary act of looking within this context see Apel, Dora, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 7–45Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ Chandler in Paul Graham, Photographs 1981–2006, 55.

⁸⁷ Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 17.

⁸⁸ Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). This passage will be cut in the 1938 edition of the essay. Quoted in Huberman, 31. My translation.