Like many young Americans in the 1960s, I first learned of Graham Nash as one of the members of the British Invasion band the Hollies, and more importantly one of its singers. His trademark was his seemingly effortless, spot-on high harmonies on songs like “Bus Stop” and “Carrie Anne” that set him apart from his peers.

When I was sixteen, Joni Mitchell, to my astonishment and delight, invited me to photograph her first concert at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. It was there that I was introduced to her beau, Graham, who was not yet twenty-seven and had only just weeks earlier left his band the Hollies and his native England to live with Joni in California. He was bright, charming, sweet, and very witty – and it was only days before he began to record the first album of his newly formed group, Crosby, Stills & Nash (after which, of course, many more people came to know his name, voice and songs). We hit it off immediately. Graham had seen earlier photos I’d taken of Joni and asked me earnestly if I could teach him how to shoot and print photos like them. “Of course, I’d love to,” I replied.

The next time we met, at another of Joni’s concerts, he too was carrying a camera, and we began what would turn into a lifelong friendship and dialogue about photography. By the time I moved out to California myself, he and Joni were no longer a couple, but I stayed close to both of them. Graham moved to a large Victorian home in San Francisco, where he passionately began building one of the earliest, most eclectic, and most important collections of vintage photography. We even shared a darkroom in the basement, where I showed him my techniques of developing film and printing photographs. While working, we would listen to cassettes of the Beatles and James Taylor’s albums, and sing all of the unsung harmonies on those records.

One day, while looking at antique cameras, Graham told me about his hometown of Salford, England, a bleak industrial town outside of Manchester where he and his sisters grew up playing in the rubble of buildings bombed by the German Luftwaffe during World War II. He told me how his father, William, himself an avid amateur photographer, had improvised a tiny darkroom in the bedroom Graham and his sister shared and began to teach an eager and curious Graham at the age of ten how to use a camera and darkroom. The next year, his father bought Graham a used camera from a coworker, not realizing it had been stolen. When the police came to their home to inquire about it, William, as a point of honor, refused to name the coworker who sold it to him and was immediately arrested, put in jail, tried on possession of stolen property, found guilty, and sentenced to a year in the notoriously harsh Strangeways prison, emerging a broken man. The effect on the family, and on Graham in particular, was devastating, and it ignited both his radiant love of photography and a burning hatred of unjust authority, both of which have stayed with him to this day. For Graham, every successful photograph he has made is, as he once said, “something to honor my father.”

Over time, this curious boy became a man simultaneously passionate about imagery and song, and he has touched other people’s lives with both. For over sixty years, his music has reached the ears and hearts of millions around the world. In this sweeping survey of Graham’s imagery, he explores mystery and illumination, order and chaos, motion and stillness, beauty and ugliness, fame and anonymity, fascination and boredom, shadows and light. No subject, human or otherwise, is lacking in fascination to him. Graham is drawn to magic, to unlikely intersections, to finding the sublime in the mundane, and especially to showing us a person’s true character or inner life in one captured moment. It’s been my great fortune to have enjoyed Graham’s company and friendship for over fifty years, and now it’s my honor and pleasure to welcome you to your own exploration of this kaleidoscopic, in-depth, and historic survey of my dear friend’s unmatched visual artistry… you’re in for a treat!

– Joel Bernstein

July 6, 2021

Excerpt from Graham Nash’s book, A Life in Focus: The Photography of Graham Nash, released in November 2021