Rock, Roll 'n Print

Rock, Roll 'n Print

Graham Nash's Introduction To Nash Editions

With special permission from Peachpit press owners of the New Riders imprint, I am able to conclude this review with Graham Nash's introduction to Nash Editions, Photography and the Art of Digital Printing in its entirety. The essay is bright, engaging and gives you a sense of the passion with which Nash approaches both music and digital printing. Enjoy.

For most of my life I've enjoyed images. It's probably because I don't remember seeing many on the walls of our home in Salford, near Manchester, in the north of England. Most of the images I remember were in magazines in the dentists' and doctors' offices I went to as a child.

Jesse Alexander, Mark Blundell (Motorola team), Cart Race, Holmestead, Florida, 1990/1997.

My father was a workingman, and his main joy in life, aside from his family, was to take photos of us and develop them at home. One day he showed me the printing process by having me watch as he set up a simple darkroom. The vision of an image coming into being from absolutely nowhere shocked me. It was just a blank piece of paper in a tray of colorless liquid, or so I thought. Watching the image of a zoo elephant I had taken that very day appear before me on that blank paper exposed me to the magic of photography. I have never lost my sense of absolute wonder at the gift I was given that day. I was eleven years old, the year I took my own first successful image, a portrait of my mother.

I began playing music in the late Fifties. By the time I was eighteen I had left the shelter of my home, become independent, and was actually able to make money doing what I loved most, making music. As I got older I began to collect images, images that changed my life and moved my soul. First it was images from the incredibly brilliant mind of M. C. Escher, then German Expressionism and novels in woodcuts by Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward with the tales told only with images...and then at the end of 1969 I bought a Diane Arbus photograph of a child in Central Park with a hand grenade clutched in his hand. I had recently finished my song "Teach Your Children," and this image moved me deeply. I began to collect photography with a passion - fantastic slices of other people's loves and lives - and my life has not been the same since.

Kathleen Barrows, Carousel at the Louvre, 1990.