People, places, and the moments in between.

In a clothing shop in Chongqing, Paul Graf stopped to watch a woman sorting shirts. The light had caught his attention. He waited until she noticed him, then released the shutter. Afterwards, they exchanged a smile.

Graf is drawn to that brief interval between noticing a stranger and deciding how to respond. He calls it “a moment of truth”: the interruption of concentration, when curiosity or puzzlement reaches the face before a person has composed themselves for the camera.

Based in Switzerland, Graf began photographing in 2020. Much of his work has been made in Brazil. He came to the medium looking for a form of intimacy he found difficult to reach through language—“wordless communication,” as he describes it, with less interference from the ego.

Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the American Depression were formative. The desperation he saw in them made him want to help people whose circumstances belonged to another time. That capacity to carry feeling across distance remains central to his interest in photography.

His attention also turns towards resilience. A small plant growing in windblown sand holds the same fascination for him as the human determination to continue. In staged work, he takes a more deliberate role, arranging bodies, light and architecture as a painter might organise a canvas.

Graf chooses photographs according to what moves him. He accepts that someone else may find an entirely different feeling in them. His criterion remains a question: “Does it evoke wordless communication?”