Customer Reviews

EYE TO EYE

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How apt that Graham Nash, at about the time his solo debut Songs for Beginners was released, took a photograph of himself reflected in a mirror. It would be the first of many such self portraits. But as the Englishman explains, it's not narcissism that made him do this. So began as much an exercise in grounding himself in the world he observes as when he walks about on stage with bare feet. The song from that album, 'Man in the Mirror', is too self-effacing:

'I don't really have much to say,

'Cause I'm living from day to day somewhere.'

Over the years, those reflections of himself, in chrome, hotel mirrors, windows, and even broken glass, place him in context with the many other things he sees. There's his family and friends of course, but alongside him are signs, paintings, Disneyland, stacks of chairs, dogs, total strangers, and furniture. His perspective is all his own; what he has absorbed from the eclectic collection of photographs he gathered over several years lies in his subconscious. (See Photographs from the Collection of Graham Nash: Auction April 25, 1990 Sale 6003.) All Nash has to do is take a picture of a man asleep beneath a department store display window as a likely customer of that store walks past; it's up to the beholder to react.

Not to be missed: Graham Nash, on the reunion trail, finding himself in a hotel room in Denver on September 11th, 2001. Having seen the television image of the towers falling, he finds the best way to record his immediate reaction is with a camera - and we have the likeness of a man feeling our collective shock and demonstrating our resilience, reflected in a shiny metal wastebasket. A metaphor? It depends on one's perspective, which Nash demonstrates a wealth of throughout every page of this book.

A 'simple man', with no pretense. He says a great deal after all, quietly and with conviction.