“For most of us, there is only the unattended moment, the moment in and out of time,” wrote poet T.S. Eliot. For photographer Paul Graham, that moment contains a shimmer of possibility.

A highway motel in Pittsburgh, sometime in the summer of 2004. For British photographer Paul Graham, who moved permanently to New York two years earlier, it is the first stop in a series of road trips he will make between then and 2007 in the United States, his new homeland. Arrived and checked into the motel, about a three-hour drive from New York, Graham hears a noise outside. He goes to look, sees a black man on the verge along the parking lot busy with a lawnmower. Graham gets out his camera, takes some pictures of the surrounding landscape, but soon realizes that the man with the lawnmower is more interesting.

He begins photographing the man as he pushes the stiff mower from left to right and back. Graham notices how his shirt, white with red and blue stripes, is a variation on the American flag, which can be seen further along atop a Travel Inn sign. The man arches his back, dabs his face with a cloth, pushes on. The verge is wide and the labor is hard.

The sun is low and hidden behind a thin, gray curtain of clouds. It starts to rain. The sun breaks through briefly, illuminating from behind the falling drops. Graham changes the focus of his camera, fluently catching the shimmering streaks of water, while a red halo, due to the backlight in the lens, targets the mowing man. It is a sublime moment, brilliantly captured by the photographer in an equally sublime image.

It is a sublime moment, but don’t call it a decisive moment. The latter concept has been forever chiseled into the Stone Tablets of photography thanks to Henri Cartier-Bresson. It encompassed a photography that had been highly cultivated since the postwar years in which form and content converged 1/125th of a second in such a way, a way that only the great masters could anticipate, that frozen into a single photograph they formed the ultimate representation of what was happening in front of the lens.

Graham opted for something different. He paid attention to both what preceded a moment and what came after. Real life had very little to do with those so-called decisive moments. Rather, it consisted of a succession of small, trivial non-events. A meandering motif of the mundane, that’s what it was.

Graham chose slowness, didn’t want to just ignore anything. He had to learn it himself. When he photographed a somewhat elderly, smoking man at the bus stop in Las Vegas in 2005, he had to slow down and take a few steps back first to realize that the lead-up to the moment when the leaning man took the most perfect puff of his cigarette, and what took place after, were equally valuable. “Perhaps instead of standing at the river’s edge scooping out water,” Graham suggested, “it’s better to be in the current itself, to watch how the river comes up to you, flows smoothly around your presence, and reforms on the other side like you were never there.”

Focus, and then letting go. Looking around you, shifting attention. Graham’s photo series reflects our essential way of looking. Each new moment offers new possibilities. The rain stops as suddenly as it began. Graham turns his gaze and his camera to the parking lot, where the brown van of the lawnmowing man gleams in the sinking sun. The man mows on, Graham steps back, the day and the sequence coming to an end without drama.

Now what is this about, Graham himself asks aloud in a 2014 interview. “Is it about racism in America, because he’s a black man and he’s working, doing this giant thing? Is it about Greek mythology, is it about Sisyphus and this great task which is never-ending, and the labors, going left and right? Is it about the beauty of the world, when the sun comes through and the raindrops shine? Is it about photography and film making, the relationship between them? Is it about life flowing, the flow of life which passes by us, and these moments come and go?” It’s about all those things, Graham says. And it’s not up to him to give a definitive answer.

In A Shimmer of Possibility, the 2007 publication that consists of 12 small, elegant volumes, Graham alternates the sequence of the grass-cutting man in the first book with a series of photographs of store shelves with canned goods and hygiene products in a skimpy-looking supermarket. The longer the man works, the emptier the shelves seem to become. “Together these two strands of images suggest a kind of fatigue, the drained energy and depleted resources of a society in which, at least for some, life is lived at subsistence level,” British author and curator David Chandler observes.

Throughout the various volumes of A Shimmer of Possibility, a certain class consciousness is always present, albeit mostly dormant. As in the short sequence in which Graham finds himself in New England in the early morning in a suburb surrounded by greenery, sampling the avenues and mansions there, eyeing the light and the leaves, and encountering an elderly woman with white hair who comes to her driveway to empty the mailbox, as the first act of the day.

She is dressed in light pastel blue. There is a fresh calm in the air, which the woman seems to be intensely soaking up in the next close-up image. Graham notices her frilly pink slippers. Do they tell something about the woman and her disposition? Or does he simply find them endearing? Graham leaves it in limbo.

“Nothing seems resolved, no particular side is taken, everything is inconclusive but there are constant questions,” Chandler writes.

“Anyone who comes to the United States with open eyes cannot fail to be moved by the racial/social inequalities here,” the photographer stated in a retrospective of the first two volumes of what would eventually become an American trilogy. “It’s the elephant in the room. To make work here, and not take that into account seems to me to be plainly ridiculous, and it makes you part of the problem…”

Graham sensed that you could measure the temperature of a country, of a nation, by watching ordinary people move through the politically fading, shifting, or heated landscape every day. This was already evident in his early documentary work in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, but also in Europe in the early 1990s, on the eve of the European Union, a Europe without borders.

In American Night, the 2003 book that preceded A Shimmer of Possibility and his first work in the United States, the country’s heat seemed scorching, the result of a blinding white light. Graham brought together heavily overexposed photographs of mostly African-American men wandering alone along streets and roads in urban peripheries – at least that’s the impression they gave, thanks to the overpowering whiteness of the images. They serve as a metaphor for the invisibility of many people in an American society blind to the gap between rich and poor, between black and white.

The bright white images, the majority of the book, are occasionally interspersed with razor-sharp photographs of so-called McMansions, large houses on subdivisions in neat suburbs, where the well-to-do middle class has room for more than one car in the driveway. No overexposure here, but saturated colors, as we know them from real estate brochures.

A little past halfway through the book follows a searing series of ten photographs of African-Americans, taken in New York. A person in a wheelchair holds his arm in front of his face, shielding himself from the bright glow of the setting sun. A woman sits braced on the sidewalk, in full sunlight, looking sternly in our direction with a slight frown. A muscular man in bare torso and holding a plastic bottle walks bent over the crosswalk, another throws open his shirt almost ecstatically, gasping for coolness, for salvation. The atmosphere is oppressive.

The clenched sequence begins and ends with a person with a white patch on his eye. It is a cinematic, dystopian picture of America that Graham paints, in a book that includes quotes from both Blindness, José Saramago’s novel about a city ravaged by blindness, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

This no longer has anything to do with classic documentary. Instead, Graham decisively goes for the metaphor. “He has chosen to work in an area, as many contemporary writers did, between documentary realism and fiction, where the observance of an everyday occurrence might be made to stand for something more universal.” That’s how Liz Jobey described it in The Guardian in 2009. Two years later, Graham named it in the same newspaper as follows: “I have been taking photographs for 30 years now, and 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. The photography I most respect pulls something out of the ether of nothingness… you can’t sum up the results in a single line.”

A Shimmer of Possibility cannot be summed up in a single line. Not when a couple is on their way home after a visit to the supermarket. The man carries two trays of Pepsi cans on his shoulder. The dominant blue of the containers resonates with his blue sweatpants, the few reds seek visual connection with the woman’s red sweater. Her white plastic bags in turn beckon to the man’s white shirt and white sneakers. Red, white and blue, again a reference to the American flag.

Not when a family picnics in a freeway parking lot. Not when a man is walking under a bridge with a cat. Not when Graham encounters a flower vendor on the street at night. Not when a black woman, leaning on a green public trash can, concentrates scratching a lot, or a white woman in a silver The Lakeside Inn & Casino jacket (there’s a stain on it) faces the sunlight with eyes closed, a banknote clutched in one hand, a coffee mug in the other (her thumbnail is blue).

Not when two black teenagers, brother and sister probably, are playing basketball in the street, somewhere in an anonymous city outskirts, in twilight. Not when a black boy steps nervously down the street, stops and smokes a cigarette. Both sequences in the book are interspersed with images of a setting sun (a recurring theme), in sometimes bright purple and orange hues, adding a strong allegorical character to the whole. Night falls over America.

A Shimmer of Possibility is about many things, but perhaps most about time. About fleeting time, which we all have to make do with, day after day. But equally, when all the ephemeral fragments are added up, it is about a zeitgeist. This is America in the very early 2000s, after 9/11, but before President Barack Obama, Black Lives Matter and President Donald Trump. In that sense, along with American Night, it reads like a poignant prelude – first loud, then soft and symphonic – to what was yet to come, but was already brewing then.

“For most of us, there is only the unattended moment, the moment in and out of time.” T.S. Eliot wrote it in ‘The dry salvages’, the third poem of his Four Quartets. “The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, the wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning, or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music, while the music lasts.”

A Shimmer of Possibility by Paul Graham is published by MACK.

This essay was commissioned by De Standaard, in a 2024 summer series in which photographers and authors take another look at that one image that helped define their vision of photography and of the world. It was slightly edited for this translation.