Paul Graham (UK, 1956) has created a protean body of work as an artist-photographer over the past 40+ years. His photography has been widely exhibited, from the Venice Biennale to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and received various awards and prizes including the Hasselblad Award, widely regarded as photography’s highest honor. He has published around 30 dedicated books, including 3 survey monographs. Relentlessly inquisitive and freely traversing genres, Graham’s work might best be regarded as four trilogies, each spanning 6 to 12 years to complete:
1: United Kingdom: 1981-1987
At the beginning of the 1980s, Graham was among the first photographers to unite contemporary colour with documentary practice. In 1981-82, he completed A1 - The Great North Road, a series of photographs along the length of the British A1 road, which had a transformative effect on the black-and-white tradition that had dominated British photography to that point. This work, along with his colour images of unemployment offices in Beyond Caring (1984-85) and the sectarian marked landscape of Northern Ireland in Troubled Land (1984-87), were pivotal in opening up a fresh area of photographic practice.
2: Europe and Japan: 1988-1998
Graham changed focus away from his UK homeland to consider how the shadow of the past seeps into present day life—difficult subject matter for a medium that engages with the observable world. New Europe (1988-1993) reflects on the tension between the echo of history and the newly borderless Western Europe. Empty Heaven (1989-1995) considers the relationship between WW2 trauma, atomic bombing, and the dream world of Japan - themes that would later be echoed in the 'Superflat' movement of Japanese art. Shifting to personal history and the forces that shape us as human beings, End of an Age (1996-98) tackles the journey from adolescence to adulthood—a personal history that can stain through adult life.
3: United States: 1999-2011
From 1999 on, Graham spent an increasing amount of time photographing in the United States before permanently relocating there in 2002. American Night (1998-2003) considers the social fracture of America, reflecting white privilege through overexposed, near white-out images that almost erase the dispossessed and working poor from sight. A shimmer of possibility (2004-2007) considers quotidian life in today’s United States, through stuttering sequences of images of everyday life: ‘visual haikus’ that embrace the flow of life over conclusiveness, “where nothing much happens, but nothing is foreclosed either.” Completing this trilogy of American works, The Present, 2009-2011, reveals doubled moments taken un-staged from the streets of New York, where the image and its twin exchange roles, reflecting on the nature of time and the photographic moment.
4: Family and Mortality: 2011-2023
More recently Graham’s work has shifted towards focusing on his family, our mortality and the transience of life. Does Yellow Run Forever? (2011-2014) entwines portraits of his partner asleep with Irish rainbows and American gold stores as a subtle meditation on the value of love and wonder against the pursuit of material wealth. Mother (2017-2019) presents quiet portraits of his elderly mother resting in her chair, gently reflecting the fraying threads of late old age. Most recently, through the pandemic years Graham completed Verdigris/Ambergris (2019-2023) a pair of mirrored works where people regard the sun setting over land and sea, interleaved with degraded images of spring blossoms and sunsets, corrupted by the camera.
In addition to these four extended suites of work, Paul Graham has completed more modest singular bodies of work that include:
Paintings