He was included in Tate's Cruel and Tender survey exhibition of 20th century photography (2003), and a European mid career survey exhibition at Museum Folkwang, Essen, which toured to the Deichtorhallen, Germany, and Whitechapel Gallery, London.

A 2015 survey of his American work, The Whiteness of the Whale, was exhibited at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Graham has won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, the Hasselblad Award, the W. Eugene Smith Grant, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and won the inaugural Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards prize for best photographic book of the past 15 years.

Between 1981 and the end of 1982, Graham photographed people and places along the A1 road in Britain (which mainly parallels the Great North Road), from the Bank of England in the City of London, and travelling north.

[2] His book Empty Heaven is devoted to Japan;[3] another, A Shimmer of Possibility, comprises 12 volumes examining everyday life in the USA.