Verdigris / Ambergris closes a twelve-year sequence of books in which Paul Graham has weighed transience against mortality. MACK published it in 2024 as two hardback volumes in a debossed slipcase, 136 pages in total. Both train on the same figure: someone at the edge of sight, scanning a horizon that cannot be reached.

One volume looks over land, the other over sea. Graham made the first in a park above post-industrial New Jersey, ground he has worked for seven years; the second along the north coast of Long Island, where watching the sun go down is an old local habit. The portraits are plain and clear, caught in golden-hour light: ordinary people, mostly turned away, looking.

Between those portraits he places cherry blossom in Verdigris and setting suns in Ambergris — the archetypal subjects of natural beauty, and the most worn by reproduction. Here they arrive damaged, and by their own making. The blossom was shot on a digital camera in an ultra-resolution mode built from many micro-shifted exposures; a light breeze was enough to defeat the assembly of a coherent picture. The sunsets come from a camera that measures colour at every pixel site rather than inferring it from neighbours, and past a certain intensity the files stain with the evidence of too much information.

The titles name two substances thrown up and transformed: verdigris, the green patina of oxidised copper, familiar from the Statue of Liberty; ambergris, the rare whale product beachcombers hunt and perfumers prize. Both are what is left after a slow chemical or bodily change. That argument — that beauty and its decay arrive together — is made through pictures rather than asserted.

Its interest for a collection lies in where it sits: the late, formally restless phase of a photographer who has spent decades testing what a camera can be asked to do, and in the way the two volumes are built to be read against each other. The corrupted file is not a flourish added to the portraits; it is the counterweight that gives them their weight.