Paul Graham’s new books Ambergris/Verdigris, published this year by MACK, have several parallels worth exploring. First and foremost, it should be said that these titles feel like a return to form. While I am a fan of most of Graham’s bodies of works, the last books have been very inward and family-oriented. There is nothing wrong with that. However, they feel something like a family album or pertain to a bit of navel-gazing on matters the artist no doubt feels are essential to him. It could be argued that his books Mother and Does Yellow Run Forever? are contemplations about those close to him. Though they extend past being simply a family study, something in those titles feels a bit like a closed circuit. His book on the tragedy of the Paris shootings in 2015, indexically titled Paris 11-15th November 2015, is something of a one-off, with a slow, repetitive pacing and brown color grading that regards the anxiety of being trapped in a space, safe but hemmed in by violence just out the door. I like that book, but it is not particularly universal, hence the indexical nature of its offering. It should also be mentioned that these new books function more like one book spanned over two volumes.

With Amergris/Verdigris, I am reminded of several approaches to Graham’s work that he has been investigating over the last two to three decades, some of which are minor and others that attempt a more monumental idea. These elements find their way into A/V, but the sum is more significant than its parts. For example, repetition has been a factor in Graham’s work since Shimmer of Possibility (Steidl, 2007) and The Present (MACK, 2012), whether it is the doubling of portraits/moments or the use of one explicit idea to create a more extensive experimental study as in Films (MACK, 2011). The use of repetition has been pertinent in his photobooks. It has become an employ that suggests time, iteration, entanglement, and arguably the uncanny, with its variations begging more significant questions about familiarity and unfamiliarity as well as alternate realities of shared experiences, whether on the street or mowing the lawn.

In Ambergris, the use of the window in its sequence is doubled in the use of flowers in Verdigris, and they could both be considered a stabilizing element; both ruminate about a type of effervescence or lightness that undergird, in repetition, the sequencing, allowing for the more central themes of what I believe to be the twilight of one’s years (not necessarily the artist himself) or rumination on death and ecology to come to the front. The same can be said for the people enjoying the sunset, featured heavily in both books. Lament is present but not without an adjacent type of sublime joy. With its billowing curtains, the window also appears in Paris 11-15th November 2015, in repetition. Ambergris adds something sensual to offset the oversaturated images of the sunsets that have been pushed into abstraction, like a Rothko painting.

This element also reminds me of his book Films, and it and Ambergris have their roots in his classic photobook End of an Age (Scalo, 1999). The zoom-in of the eye on the cover and the playfulness of testing photography’s material essence to its edge are found there and in the images here of sunsets. I could make the case, although tenuously, that in retrospect, Empty Heaven and his use of flash while looking at Japan and the after-effects of the Atomic Bomb also surface here as an anxious parallel with the sun enveloping the world in front of the camera. It is not 1000 suns, but it does not need to be. There is a feeling that this suggests climate anxiety, but perhaps it is just a distorted postcard. Maybe that train of thought, like the experimentation in Films, has brought these stretched and blinding pixels to Ambergris. This same notion of blindness could also be drawn from American Night and the white-out effects of the images found within that book, a snowblind first attempt to dissect the American landscape. That book should receive far more credit than it does. I prefer it to Shimmer of Possibility.

Of course, with the title Ambergris, we might also be reminded of his (hard not to read into this) discussion regarding racial politics in America surfaces in The Whiteness of the Whale (MACK 2015), a compendium of his earlier books which is presumably a nod to Moby Dick but might also be sufficiently charged enough to discuss these social and political observations. In getting to the Whiteness of Moby Dick, we can also think of the whale’s vomit or perhaps the parable of Jonah becoming something that is distilled, bottled, and becomes a luxuriant perfume known as ambergris. Ambergris is a by-product of the sperm whale’s gut, a waxy substance known to be used for perfume and Eastern medicinal remedies, and is therefore highly valued. Tie this to the climate anxiety, and another parable can be drawn from the suggestion of what is sacred, be it planet or other. Jonah could be seen as a profit voyager in the bowels of the messenger whale. One wants to be careful reading too much into these things, but metaphors can often work on an individual basis as well as a collective one.

There is also the mechanical nature of the two-volume set. These books run together like a sequence of four ideas spread throughout two books, with people watching the sun go down as the hinge. Shimmer of Possibility is another multi-book project. Though this project has fewer elements, it is still hooked to the idea that they are read together in some way instead of being independent volumes. Perhaps it is a language of bookmaking borrowed from waiting some birds a bus a woman by Anders Edström (Steidl/MACK, 2004), whose own two-volume set interspersed potential, if disparate narratives that run together to join the two volumes. Though less direct, Edström is a known quantity for Graham, and perhaps this is an exciting way for the British artist to work four elements into two books without retreading the exact steps that led to SOP.

The portraits in A/V are reflective. They seem expectant and waiting. Perhaps there is the act of viewing the sunset, but perhaps there is also the feeling of an unnerving incoming that we can attribute to their watching. With Leave the World Behind, a film released in 2023, the threat of an unseen but present threat dominates the frame; anxiety is related to communities and fleeing without impact being directly observed. One can’t help but see the watchers in Graham’s work as having some kinship to that particular motif. Whether it is implied or not, the unnerving nature of the books deserves mention.

Ambergris and Verdigris are quite exciting additions to Graham’s career. He uses elements found throughout his previous bodies of work but pushes his cosmology of practice to a new level. I feel the energy returning to the work, and the books sit somewhere around the Empty Heaven and End of An Age era for me. Perhaps this comes after those titles and before American Night in the line of books, but that said, the concept and the execution feel more masterful. At first, repetition will be difficult for people and might only attract more interest later. Still, either way, it is fantastic to see the work hint at something more universal and see Graham infuse more energy and less poetry into the work. Again, it feels like a return to form, even in the fractured use of two books with what appears to be four chapters, some of which are consistent over the divide of both volumes. If you are a Graham fan, this is essential reading despite the haunted overtones hinting about colony collapse and end times.