Brian Graham and Robert Frank: four decades of friendship, films and photographs

Goin' Down the Road

is the title of a Canadian

directed by Donald Shebib. A story of broken dreams. That of two young people from Nova Scotia who, seduced by the lights of the city, go to Toronto to come face to face with the adversity and loneliness that every big city contains. Released in 1970, the film was very popular with Robert Frank (Zürich, Switzerland, 1924- Inverness, Nova Scotia, 2019), who, more than a decade ago, had another

through foreign lands

had established him as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century through a book:

Even so, the artist would never abandon his

When Shebib's film was released, Frank was dedicated to cinema. It was a year before the author decided to take up the camera again, after having abandoned it in 1959. He settled in Nova Scotia, in a house with sea views in Mabou, Inverness, where he lived with his second wife, the sculptor June Leaf. , he alternated his stays in New York with a country life. In 1981, one fine day, Brian Graham (Glace Bay, Canada, 1951), a young art graduate with a passion for photography—whose life had been spent in the mining town of Glace Bay and working on the oil platforms of the North Atlantic— , plucked up the courage to knock on the famous author's door. They hit it off immediately. “He liked my story about growing up in Glace Bay. He listened to me and said, “Obviously, you have to go back there and photograph where you come from.” On the next visit, Frank would give him a Polaroid camera. A little later he sent her a postcard from New York, inviting her to move into his house. The young Canadian did not need long to move to Bleecker Street, where he would begin helping Frank with the carpentry work of the house before being able to access the darkroom. “Robert helped me defeat the devil with Polaroid Type 665 positive/negative film. The boss had respect and interest in people who went out on the road and came back with a good story to tell,” recalls the Canadian photographer, who was his assistant for ten years.

That friendship, which would last until the end of the famous artist's life, has been reflected in a book

an unusual and melancholic approach to the daily life of the elusive photographer, full of spontaneity and candor. Of the “randomness and inadvertence,” which Ai Weiwei describes in the prologue of the monograph, as one of the defining characteristics of the reality in which many of the inhabitants of the East Village lived in the 1980s. The Chinese artist coincided with the Canadian in those days. “When [Graham] took the photographs we see here, we didn't know what he was doing, where he was, or why these images were being taken. It is precisely this randomness and aimlessness that explains the power of photography and the inexplicable motivation of photography.”

Thus we will meet Frank in his ramshackle New York studio; driving spikes into the roof; unpacking the objects that were part of an inheritance that came to him from Switzerland or directing the actress Kazuko Oshima during the filming of

, in Nova Scotia. The film that he co-directed with Rudy Wurlitzer tells the story of a guitarist whose

takes place on foot among marginal characters, among them those played by Joe Strummer, Arto Lindsay and Tom Waits, whom in that same year, 1985, he portrayed during the recording and for the back cover of his first album,

Graham was there, to immortalize those moments with his camera. “Our perception of the reality of the past, if detached from visual images and records, would be illusory,” warns Ai Weiwei.

Graham would soon meet Allen Ginsberg, who at that time was photographing those close to him non-stop, accompanying the images with elaborate handwritten captions. “What is sex like in Nova Scotia?” was the first thing the poet asked the young Canadian before giving him a plastic bag full of reels to make the contacts. Contacts that they would later show to Frank, his mutual friend, so that he could instruct them. “One of the important things I learned from Robert: the entire shot doesn't need to be printed. You can extract anything,” Graham recalled in an interview. “He had a lot of patience with Allen and me, and with a lot of people. But what was good about him is that he was never going to tell you: 'Forget it, leave it.' However, everything had a limit and just as Frank liked to help, he did not always feel comfortable being photographed. On one occasion when Graham took a self-portrait next to him, the elusive Swiss photographer ended up scratching the negative.

If Frank was proud of anything, it was having contacted members of the Beat movement shortly after arriving in the United States. “They taught me that there was another life,” he said during an interview on the occasion of a retrospective at the MoMA in San Francisco. “They wanted to have a different life, live within this culture but be different. A good goal to set here.” In Graham's photos you can breathe that freedom. “Things move forward, time passes, people leave and sometimes they don't come back,” Frank warned. The photographs will endure as only traces, vibrant and cruelly sincere.

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