“A small act of dissent.”
We visited British photographer Paul Graham in his New York storage and found him working on a small series of the Statue of Liberty.
”You are asking me what the Statue of Liberty means to me as a British person? You know, I’m an immigrant, happily living here. It’s got its problems, but what country doesn’t? I love it as a welcoming symbol of idealism: ’Bring me your poor, your huddled.’ This gift from France, from Europe. From the old world to the new world. It’s old America. Old core values of America.”
”It is work in progress. The germ of the idea was a modest form of protest. A reminder of the utopia that America stood for. But it’s very early work, you know. You have to start somewhere.”
Paul Graham is a contemporary British photographer living and working in New York City. Born in 1956 in Stafford, United Kingdom, he studied at Bristol University and began taking photographs during the 1970s. In 1981, Graham completed his first acclaimed work, A1: The Great North Road, a series of color photographs made along the A1, Great Britain’s longest numbered road connecting London and Edinburgh at both ends. His use of color film in the early 1980s, when British photography was dominated by the traditional black-and-white social documentary, had a revolutionary effect on the genre. Soon, a new school of photography emerged, with artists like Martin Parr, Richard Billingham, Simon Norfolk, and Nick Waplington making the switch to color.
Graham is known for his sequential color prints of people engaged in daily life. His 12-volume photobook, A Shimmer of Possibility (2007), summarizes Graham’s interest in drawing attention to overlooked activities or places. “It has steadily become less important to me that the photographs are about something in the most obvious way. I am interested in more elusive and nebulous subject matter,” he has explained. The artist has been the subject of more than eighty solo exhibitions worldwide. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum (all in New York City), the Tate Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum (both in London), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Fotomuseum Winterthur, Musee de la Photographie (Charleroi), Det Kongelige Bibliotek (Copenhagen), among others.
Paul Graham was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in his New York City storage in March 2026.
Camera: Simon Weyhe
Edited by: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026
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