Paul Graham, the European-born New York–based artist-photographer, has published his second body of American work, titled a shimmer of possibility, in a boxed set of 12 multicolored clothbound books featuring images of the everyday (Steidl; $250; edition of 1,000). Graham uses a modest photographic sequence throughout to portray human frailty as revealed in fleeting moments from otherwise unremarkable lives: a smoker at a bus stop depicted with heroic gravitas or a woman sitting on a New Orleans doorstep beside an empty container of fried chicken with a cigarette between her greasy fingers. Rarely are such moments noticed or memorialized with such poetry and empathy.
—MIRANDA DEMPSTER, ART DIRECTOR