gious awards. His work is also to be found in the
collections of museums and galleries such as the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Mu-
seum of Modern Art, New York; and institutional
and private collections across Europe, the United
States, and Japan.
Born in Stratford, England in 1956, Graham
attended Bristol University from 1974–1978.
Graduating with a Bsc. in Microbiology, Graham
had no formal education in photography but had
his first solo exhibition at the Arnolfini, Bristol in
- His seriesHouse Portraitsfrom this period
was included in the group exhibitionHouses and
Homesin 1982. The austere color photographs of
new housing developments display from an early
stage the tension between Graham’s photographic
and political influences, a characteristic of much
of his work. The composition and use of photo-
graphic objectivity, references the work of Walker
Evans, and that of Lewis Baltz and those asso-
ciated with the New Topographics group. How-
ever, the choice of subject, the sprawling suburban
housing estates that formed what are commonly
referred to as New Towns, stems not only from
the economic phenomenon of the built environ-
ment but also the superficial construction of the
communities that lived there.
In 1982, Graham took up a teaching position at
Exeter College of Art, where he was Lecturer in
Photography until 1984. In 1983, he received an
Arts Council Publication Award, and in the same
year he publishedA1-The Great North Road, which
toured several galleries in England as an exhibition
under the same title. The photographic series of
garages, service-stations, and cafes dotted along
the main arterial route from the north to south of
England examined the alienation of traveling indi-
viduals from the built environment they passed
through on their journeys.
In 1984, Graham left Exeter College of Art to
become Lecturer in Photography at West Surrey
College of Art and Design, where he taught from
1984–1987. In 1985, he received a Greater London
Arts Association Award and in 1986 the second of
his four Arts Council Publications Awards. Dur-
ing the same year, he published and toured a body
of work under the titleBeyond Caring. The series
depicted the waiting rooms of London DHSS
unemployment offices. While his previous work
had concentrated on the alienation of the indivi-
dual from the built environment around them, this
series focused on the institutional spaces where
individuals had to confront the mechanisms of
state that affected their everyday lives. This series
was a departure from his earlier work and was
very much in the vein of social documentary.
Unlike much British documentary from this per-
iod, however, Graham used color photography, a
format that brought criticism from photo journal-
ists and documentary photographers who held on
to the altruistic ideals of traditional black-and-
white documentary photography.
Graham’s work does not fall easily into the pre-
scribed genres of photographic practice, an aspect
that is evident in his body of work on Northern
Ireland, Troubled Land. In this series, Graham
photographed those spaces where Nationalist and
Unionist communities of Northern Ireland laid
claims to territory by using painted curb stones
and political graffiti. The series made references
to both the genres of landscape and conflict photo-
graphy. Graham has been one of the few visiting
photographers to take a critical approach to
Northern Ireland, and his work is often cited as
an influence on Irish photographers who have
taken the dominant representations of Northern
Ireland in the popular media as a departure point
for their own work.
Troubled Landwas published as a book in 1987
in what was to prove a busy and successful year for
the photographer. Early in the year, he received the
Young Photographers Award from the Interna-
tional Centre of Photography, New York; the
Channel 4/Arts Council Video Bursary, London;
and a commission from the Hayward Gallery, Lon-
don. Throughout the year, he also participated in
solo and group exhibitions in Europe, North
America, and Japan.
In 1988, Graham was awarded the W. Eugene
Smith Memorial Fellowship, USA, and the follow-
ing year was made Fellow of Photography by the
Museum of Photography, Film, and Television,
Bradford, England. In 1990, he published and
exhibited a second body of work on Northern Ire-
land under the titleIn Umbra Res.The series moved
away from the broad compositional representation
of territory inTroubled Land, to informal studies of
people and objects, which were used metaphorically
and metonymically to describe the conflict. The
photographs were exhibited as diptyches and trip-
tyches to form a narrative within the broader scope
of the work, a strategy used in the seriesNew Eur-
ope, exhibited the following year.
Throughout 1990–1995 Graham regularly pho-
tographed in Japan and continued to work on his
Television Portrait series. In 1992 and 1995, he
was again recipient of an Arts Council Publica-
tions Award. In 1995, a series of his work on
Japan was published as a book, Empty Heaven.
Again using a combination of portraits and ob-GRAHAM, PAUL