In this major new series, American Night, taken between 1998 and 2003, Paul Graham touches on the great unspoken inequality of America – the divide between rich and poor, have and have-not, whites and blacks – in other words, the other side of the American Dream. What startles about Graham’s work is that the vast majority of these images are pale and highly bleached-out. There is a stark whiteness, suggesting a cruel desert light, a searing brightness, where one looks at the American landscape with pain. It’s much like walking out of a darkened movie into bright sunlight and getting temporarily blinded and unable to take in the harsh glare of the real world. Only with time can you adapt to this restricted palette enough to notice the lone figures walking, waiting, slumped, sitting, staggering or circling across the terrain of Middle America.

Some of those portrayed are homeless, but most are simply the impoverished heart of black America. The figures one fleetingly see through the windshield as you travel down the freeways, walking on the grass beside the road, or crossing the parking lot as you enter the Mall. Those individuals glimpsed but never really considered, whose presence is so ubiquitous that they have achieved invisibility.

It is strange how shocking these bleached images are – how we first find them ‘manipulated’ or ‘contrived’. Take these same pictures and use traditional photographic technique to push them into deep shadows or near-darkness, and we accept that as natural and legitimate – shadows, darkness and gloom equal impoverished life, right? Yet adjust that same image the equivalent amount into whiteness and it seems unreal, though it is no less manipulated than what we previously accepted. Move beyond this issue and you quickly realise how effective it is, how the whiteness is painful at first but we soon acclimatise to it and accept a landscape without real shadow or colour, shape or form. We adapt to this restricted palette, negotiating our way through suburban America, just as those portrayed within them go about negotiating the restricted options of their lives.

At this point, however, the sequence suddenly snaps, and we stumble into a full-colour image of a comfortable new American home. Situated under a vibrant blue sky these ‘dream homes’, resplendent in their pristine perfection complete with a shiny new car, seem to represent both Middle America’s fortress against the dispossessed, and the false promise of the American dream – riches for all, blue skies, affluence, comfort and security. Turn the page and we are back in the unforgiving landscape of scalding white bleakness. Just when you thought you’d adapted and were happy with your lot, you get to glimpse what you’re missing, and then it was taken away again. It’s brutal, cruel, mocking, and bitingly accurate.

The only real break to this narrative of light is when we stumble deep into the city and Graham flips to claustrophobic darkness for a solid block of 10 images, where classic street photography is played out on the streets of New York, from Harlem to the Bronx. Uptight, close and in-your-face, it spins us around like a play-within-a-play, before throwing us out, back onto the hot tundra of the dystopia that is everyday America.

So here we have a literally blinding vision across 21st century U.S.A. One that will make some people angry, one that will polarise and confuse, be dismissed as trickery or manipulation, but one that simply needs some honesty and openness. It attempts to engage with the world at a time when artists retreat from doing that. Above all, it’s a work about seeing in a time of willful blindness, and as such, it is deserving of thoughtful attention.