Paul Graham is one of the greatest British fine art and documentary photographers. He now lives and works in New York. His series, A1 - The Great North Road (1982) was instrumental in introducing colour to British documentary photography.

Since the 1980s, Graham has made a number of acclaimed bodies of work, including Troubled Land, looking at the shadow of the Troubles on everyday life in Northern Ireland and New Europe, marking Graham’s move from a colloquially British to international artist. However, he is best known for revitalizing street photography – and Cartier-Bresson’s concept of ‘the decisive moment’ – with his seminal series A Shimmer of Possibility (2005), one part of a trilogy of works representing the USA, which also includes American Night (2003) and The Present (2012). These three series can also be said to be an exploration of the three main functions of the camera, the intentionally over exposed photographs of American Night representing the f-stop, A Shimmer of Possibility representing the shutter and The Present representing focus, and how these three controls influence how we make and perceive photographs.

A Shimmer of Possibility is a collection of series of photographs taken on the streets of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Nevada and New York. Here, Graham captures day-to-day life and the seemingly ordinary people and scenarios of these neighbourhoods. Originally published as a set of 12 individual photobooks, each group of images is designed to tell a short story of life in modern America. The images replicate how an observer might view time passing, glancing fragments of a scene from slightly different perspectives as it unfolds over a few seconds. The subjects are often seen in isolation and in difficult circumstances, but Graham’s ability to pinpoint and draw our attention to moments of beauty within a larger context give credence to the small-scale hopefulness of the series’ title.