Verdigris / Ambergris

Verdigris / Ambergris completes a twelve-year suite of works by Paul Graham focused on life’s transience and our mortality. This pair of sibling books is centered on people scanning the infinite horizon as they look out over land (Verdigris) and sea (Ambergris). Interleaved with these contemplative portraits in the first volume are images of cherry blossoms and in the second images of the setting sun. These photographs are made respectively in a park overlooking post-industrial New Jersey, in which Graham has worked for the past seven years, and along the northern coast of Long Island, where there is a long tradition of watching the setting sun. Graham takes these archetypal objects of natural beauty – and their observers – to form a layered examination of the ways we see and experience the beauty of the world. While the portraits of horizon-watchers are captured with golden-hour clarity, the interleaved images in each volume have been corrupted through the process of their creation. T