“[…] What I’m doing is saying hold my hand, let’s walk through this moment together. Let’s go through this moment of seeing life happen around us. The most ordinary everyday life.” Paul Graham, 2020

We are delighted to announce the opening of Paul Graham’s second solo exhibition in Berlin. The photographer, who was born in England in 1956, lives and works in London and New York. Graham has made probably one of the most significant contributions to contemporary photography in recent years in the cycle “A shimmer of possibility”, which came into being over the last few years, with a 12-volume edition published by Steidl in 2007. The exhibition at carlier | gebauer comprises eight works from the cycle.

Graham is part of the tradition of US photographers such as Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander or Robert Frank, and the art world’s reception of their work from the 1970s on. Since the early 80s the evolution of Graham’s photographic work has slotted into the tradition of classical English documentary photography around Martin Parr, Richard Billingham, Tom Wood, Paul Seawright and others. Graham has made a significant contribution to renewing and extending the scope of the visual language in documentary photography and British social critique.

A wide-ranging portrait of the USA in the 21st century has come into being in “A shimmer of possibility”. The title cites the Russian author Anton Chekhov, whose succinct use of words Paul Graham counters with a kindred concision in photography. In just a few shots Graham moves in closer to a moment, its depiction not concluded but its meaning tapped into as part of a continuum of human life. In photography Graham reflects the openness and transparency of Chekhov’s stories, which seize the moment without categorising it.