In 1981, Graham completed his first body of work, A1 – The Great North Road. The series of colour photographs captured life along England’s ageing arterial road, the A1. The pioneering series went on to receive critical acclaim, and was followed by Beyond Caring (1984-1985), which was a visual record of unemployment in Britain under Thatcher, and Troubled Land (1984-1986), which depicted landscapes in Northern Ireland during the years of the Troubles. 

Graham has since gone on to produce over 12 further bodies of work that include New Europe (1986-1992), Television Portraits (1986-1990), Empty Heaven (1989-1995), Ceasefire (April 1994), End of the Age (1996-1998), Paintings (1997-1999), American Night (1998-2002), a shimmer of possibility (2004-2006), Films(2011), The Present (2011), Does Yellow Run Forever? (2011-2014), and Financial Landscape (2017-present). Graham has produced dedicated monographs to nearly every series of work, his most celebrated, perhaps, was his twelve-volume collection, a shimmer of possibility, created in collaboration with steidlMACK. The book won the 2011 Paris Photo Book Prize for the most important photography book published in the past 15 years.

Paul Graham was born in the UK in 1956. Paul Graham’s work has been the subject of more than eighty international solo exhibitions. Works from Graham’s series Paintings were included in the exhibition, Plateau of Humankind, as part of the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. In 2011, a twenty-five year survey of Graham’s work, Paul Graham: Photographs 1981-2006, was held at the Museum Folkwang, Essen and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. More recently, in 2014, Graham staged exhibitions of his project Does Yellow Run Forever? at both Carlier Gebauer Gallery, Berlin, and Pace & Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York. Other exhibitions include The Whiteness of the Whale, Bombas Gens Centre d’Art, Valencia (2017), La Blancheur de la Baleine, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Arles (2018), Mother, Carlier Gebauer , Berlin (2020), and The Seasons, Pace Gallery, New York (2020). Graham has been awarded a number of prestigious awards, including the Hasselblad International Award for Photography (2012), the Royal Photographic Society Award, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (both 2009) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010). His works are held in the collection of Arts Council of Great Britain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Tate Gallery, London and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

He lives and works in New York.