Brian Graham: Goin’ Down the Road with Robert Frank
Brian Graham and Ai Weiwei
Robert Frank carefully entwined his life and work, yet the man behind the camera always remained enigmatic. Goin’ Down the Road with Robert Frank is a rare insider’s look at Frank’s world by his longtime friend and assistant (both in and out of the darkroom) Brian Graham. Graham’s photos, made between 1979 and 2019, take us behind the scenes of Frank at work—on location for his 1987 film Candy Mountain, photographing Allen Ginsberg, inspecting contact sheets—and into his private life: laughing with his wife June Leaf, exploring a thrift shop, even fixing the roof of his Bleecker Street studio. Candid and spontaneous, Graham’s images are often arranged in filmic sequences that create a sense of events unfolding in real time. Framed by nostalgic notes (by Graham as well as novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer) and an introduction by Ai Weiwei (another of Graham’s friends from the Lower East Side in the 1980s and ’90s), these images form an intimate and original portrait of Robert Frank, a central figure both in Graham’s photography and the history of the medium.
Born in Glace Bay, Canada, in 1951, Brian Graham earned his Bachelor of Arts from St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, in 1973. He moved to New York in 1981 to pursue photography and there assisted and printed for Robert Frank for more than a decade. He also printed the archives of Allen Ginsberg (chronicling the Beat years), the Walker Evans Estate and Rosalind Fox Solomon. Graham has photographed throughout Africa, Europe and the Americas, and exhibited in New York, Berlin and Lisbon.
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