To See or Not to See : Musician Graham Nash Surprises Viewers With His Well-Respected Photograph Collection

“Seeing. It’s something most of us take for granted. Oh, most of us -- looking is the art of not bumping into things. Seeing is the absorption of all the visual and tactile information available at the moment. So much of seeing involves feeling, feeling the essence of life.

I’ve always had a voracious appetite for imagery, and in the past I’ve collected works by American illustrator Lynd K. Ward, Belgian graphic artist Frans Masereel and Dutch artist M. C. Escher. Then one day 16 years ago in San Francisco, while I was on a search for works by Escher in a dusty, out-of-the-way gallery, my eye was drawn to a photograph that changed the way I saw--an electrifying shot by Diane Arbus of a small boy in Central Park. He’s clenching a toy grenade in his right hand, and is so intense that his left hand is distorted. The underlying hatred in his young face seemed to say that this boy would gladly blow me away, and the rest of the world with me. Hovering behind him, like some suburban Madonna, is the figure of a woman. Is she his mother, ready to undo all the damage he might wreak, or just a bystander? The moment was chilling; the madness of war seemed to crystallize in that photograph. And I suddenly realized that, in spite of my political involvement in performing at anti-Vietnam benefits and rallies, I wasn’t seeing the world with clarity. Arbus, with her great gift, was teaching me how. It made me realize that I’d missed a lot, and I instantly resolved to make a greater effort to react to what I saw, and not just be a passive bystander. ‘Child With Toy Hand Grenade’ was the photograph that started me collecting images that affected me deeply, and whenever I found one, I couldn’t leave the gallery without it.

On a hot, sticky day in Los Angeles, I stumbled into Jake and Josephine Zeitlin’s bookstore and art gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. It felt good to get out of the sun, and it took a while for my eyes to adjust to the dim light. In the back of the store, up on a balcony, I started looking in drawers that for some reason attracted me. I have this uncanny sense of where treasures are hiding, and this time was no exception. Underneath several images that were less than thrilling lay a rare jewel. It was an anonymous photograph of Marilyn Monroe at 16. How beautiful and unravaged by life she is in this innocent picture. I asked the price and held my breath. Unbelievably, it was only $20, and I was reminded that the value of an image is measured in the quality of its vision and not its cost or name value. Leaving the gallery, I felt like a thief in broad daylight, and have often wished that I could locate Marilyn’s photographer to let him know the pleasure he has given me.

In a contemporary gallery in rainy San Francisco, another image changed my life. ‘Tomoko in Bath,’ a photograph taken in 1972 in Minamata, Japan, by W. Eugene Smith, shows a woman bathing her crippled daughter, who has been deformed by mercury poisoning caused by a chemical plant. The photograph spoke not only of a mother’s love but of the consequences of pollution. I felt goose bumps rising on my skin as I held the piece in my hands.

When I have to choose between two prints of the same image, I am always drawn to the more personal one. It brings me closer to the artist, closer to the ‘greatness’ I seek. This is how I felt when I saw the line ‘I cried when I took this photo,’ written in an almost childlike scrawl on the bottom edge of a photo by Arthur Fellig, alias Weegee. It shows the terrified faces of two women witnessing the death of their family in a tenement fire in New York City, and I think I am as moved by the expression on their faces as Weegee must have been when he took the shot and wrote his simple reaction on the print. I almost cried myself. With a young family of my own, it’s easy for me to imagine being in the same awful situation.

Eight years ago, my wife, Susan, my friend and curator Graham Howe and I selected 167 images from the 2,000 or so I’ve collected for a traveling exhibition. At the dining-room table in my house in San Francisco, the three of us spent many days reacquainting ourselves with our friends, the photographs. We each had favorites. We also found that one has to be very careful where to display an image; each cannot help but affect the one next to it, so it becomes possible to guide the viewer through the experience. This became an important part of what we were trying to do. We had to know if the photographs could affect people as powerfully as they affected us.

In 1979, the collection was shown at UCLA. In the weeks that followed, I received many letters from people who said that they were never quite the same after the exhibit. Whatever experiences they had brought with them had fused with the photographs. They told me that they began to see differently, that their viewpoint had expanded. They spoke about seeing humanity in a new light. This was exactly the effect we were seeking when we decided to send the photographs out into the world.

In these fast-forward times, when life is changing so rapidly, it takes all our skill just to keep from drowning in an ocean of information. But instead of retreating into a shell, we must retrain ourselves to become more aware of our surroundings and to rediscover the world. Perhaps the first thing to do is to open our eyes and our hearts to the images around us.”

PRODUCED BY LINDEN GROSS