Does Yellow Run Forever?

Does Yellow Run Forever? is Paul Graham's meditation on desire and belief, following the color yellow from the promise of gold at a rainbow's end to the storefronts that turn hope into hard currency.

Published by MACK in 2014 as a debossed, faux suede-bound hardback, the 96-page book interweaves three groups of images: rainbows photographed in western Ireland, a sleeping dreamer, and cash-for-gold stores across the United States. The imagery moves between fact and reverie, refusing a single reading and holding love, wealth, and beauty in the same uncertain light — there is no singular meaning, and no gold waiting at the end of the rainbow, only startling visions in the everyday.

Graham (b. 1956) has spent four decades photographing everyday American and British life with a documentary eye alert to political and social undercurrent, in books including New Europe, American Night, and the twelve-volume a shimmer of possibility. Does Yellow Run Forever? extends that practice into a more allegorical register, using color itself as its organizing idea.