Paul Graham

‘Suddenly, it was like this light went on. It was the discovery that you could actually say something with photography.’

Graham initially trained as a microbiologist before teaching himself photography after encountering Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Working in colour, he made three breakthrough books in the 1980s, A1, on the Great North Road; Beyond Caring in dole offices during the high unemployment of the 1980s and Troubled Land on the civil war in Northern Ireland. He has stretched colour photography to its limits, as in the bleached–out images of American Night. Since 2002 he has lived in America where he has produced three bodies of work: American Night, a shimmer of possibility and The Present, made from 1998 to 2011.