Brian Graham: Goin’ Down the Road with Robert Frank

Description

Photography provides us with indispensable reserves of ore for our memories, which can be smelted and cast again. – 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.