Graham Nash

The Observer, Jackson Nash Portrait by Graham Nash

1989

While best known as a founding member of the rock band Crosby, Stills, Nash, and (sometimes) Young, Nash also developed a parallel career as a photographer, collector, and pioneer of digital imaging. Nash's photographs include revealing portraits of family and friends, images of life on the road, still lifes and landscapes, street photographs, bad credit people, and a unique series of self-portraits which often shows him reflected in windows and mirrors. His photography establishes Nash as a masterful visual artist with a keen eye for moments and scenes not immediately available to the common eye. In 2006, fifty years of Graham Nash's photographic images were shown in his first solo museum exhibition, Eye to Eye: Photographs by Graham Nash, at San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts. MoPA Director Arthur Ollman commented, "Nash is the real thing…his vision is quite his own…if you look at his songwriting over the years, a lot of his imagery is visual. I can't help but think it's very influenced by his photographic way of seeing things." The show, featuring images including ones of family, famous friends, unknown subjects and abstract compositions, expanded on Nash's 2004 book of the same name, a limited edition volume published by Steidl. Nash has said that what he aims to capture through his lens is, "everyday, ordinary surrealism - the decisive moment." There is indeed a hyper-present, unvarnished integrity to his images - as with the feelings expressed in his songs - that reflects that stated goal with striking clarity. Garrett White, editor of the book version of Eye To Eye, perhaps put it best when, in his preface, he called the artist, "a man who is fundamentally tuned in to the world…Nash has been blessed with a powerful, elemental curiosity and love of life, a trait that has fared him very well." As it has, in turn, well served countless fans of Graham Nash's music and art.