Paul Graham, is a British photographer known for combining colour documentary and artistic aspects of photography and he has his roots in the work of Walker Evans, Robert Adams, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, or Diane Arbus rather than the artists using photography tradition of Andreas Gursky, Rineke Djikstra, Thomas Struth Wall, Gregory Crewdson and Thomas Demand.

He takes aim at the rhetoric of the latter in The Unreasonable Apple, where he states:

a sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get photography. They get artists who use photography to illustrate their ideas, installations, performances and concepts, who deploy the medium as one of a range of artistic strategies to complete their work. But photography for and of itself -photographs taken from the world as it is– are misunderstood as a collection of random observations and lucky moments, or muddled up with photojournalism, or tarred with a semi-derogatory ‘documentary’ tag.

Nor is the art world versus the photography world, because it is not apples or potatoes, anymore than it is sculpture or painting. Graham is taking aim at the narrowness and blindness of the art institution which affirms the artist photographer at the expense of the topographical one:

It means their work will almost never be considered for Documenta, or placed alongside other artists in a Biennale, or found for sale in major contemporary art galleries and art fairs. This does not just deprive the public of the work, and the work of its place, it denies these artists the self-confidence that enables them to grow, to feel appreciation and affirmation, not to mention some modest financial reward allowing them to continue to work. It is also, most importantly, seeing the world of visual art in narrow terms. It is seeing the apple as unreasonable.