Chasing Mirrors Through A Haze

'Graham Nash, NYC' © Graham Nash, Date Unknown

Sir Graham Nash was not only a prolific singer-songwriter, as the proverbial "and," in the band Crosby, Stills, and Nash,  he was also a brilliant photographer who, for the last five decades, has captured beautiful, haunting imagery of his own life with his camera.  Nash was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, England in 1942 at the tail end of World War 2. In the early 1960s Nash inadvertently entered the musical phenomenon known as the British Invasion with the band The Hollies.  In 1968, upon a visit to Los Angeles, Nash would meet David Crosby in Laurel Canyon and the rest was, as you say, history.  Looking through Graham Nash's photography I am reminded of thefragility of a true artist - an artist that seems entirely unaffected by his fame.  In the miasma of chaos and casualty, Nash is constantly asking himself questions, what with the common denominator reliant on self portraiture, his photographs seem more of a personal odyssey; a forty days and forty nights trek through the barren desert of queries about our own mortality.  Through the love and terror of a universe that does not answer back, there is a sense of acquiescence and peace in the not knowing, that gives Nash's images a tremendous aura of existential tranquility.  Last night, Graham Nash's song 'Simple Man,' from his first solo album Songs for Beginners (1971), came on the shuffle at around midnight, at random, from my vast library of music. Its a sad tale of love, woe, and heartbreak, written by someone way more than just a simple man - Sir Graham Nash - who turns 69 today. Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper / Images by Graham Nash