(Credits: Far Out / Marsha Miller / LBJ Library)
Sun 11 January 2026 15:00, UK
As quality cameras became increasingly affordable and 24-hour film processing shops popped up in every town, the age of candid photography really took off in the 1960s and ‘70s.
For most people, the thousands of pictures they took of their pals and coworkers in that era gradually ended up stuffed into shoeboxes or dusty photo albums, but for Graham Nash, they became a widely published coffee table book.
Call it celebrity privilege if you will, but no matter how you feel about Nash’s skills behind the lens, there’s no denying that the subject matter of his candid photography was a tad more interesting than your average dark room enthusiast for his circle of friends and co-workers, after all, included many of the all-time legends of rock n’ roll: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Mama Cass, Bob Dylan, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, so on. Thus, his collection of unposed portraits of these artists, in their primes, as seen with their guards down, makes for quite a unique project.
Nash was promoting his photo book, titled A Life in Focus: The Photography of Graham Nash, throughout 2021, and chatted with Ultimate Classic Rock about some of the images therein, which included an interesting insight into the effort required to capture a shot of Neil Young versus the other members of CSNY.
“It’s more difficult shooting pictures of Neil than it is David or Stephen,” Nash said, “because David and Stephen are my friends. Neil is my friend, obviously—I’ve been making music with him for about 50 years. But he’s less approachable than David or Stephen. He’s in his own world, and I love the fact that he’s completely dedicated to the muse of music… I felt that Neil knew that I’d taken interesting shots of him, and he was hemming and hawing, so I stopped taking pictures, but I’d already shot four or five that I knew would be alright.”
Talking about another shot of his former girlfriend, Joni Mitchell, Nash rather brashly recalled how “we used to light up the room when we walked in, all those great things about a blooming romance”.
One of the standout photos from his book was actually one that hadn’t survived in pristine condition, which was a photo of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash together on stage in 1969, salvaged from a damaged negative.
“Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t show a damaged negative,” Nash explained, “But in this case, the damage to the negative added to the mystery of the moment, I believe. And those two guys really liked each other. It’s Bob Dylan, for fuck’s sake! To me, the greatest writer and singer of songs that we have in this country. To see his appreciation of Johnny Cash, they really liked each other. I’ve seen a couple of letters between them that are incredibly, beautifully friendly. It wasn’t like, ‘That’s Bob Dylan and that’s Johnny Cash’. No. They were in the same business, the same line of work. They loved each other.”
Nash is hardly the first musician to bow to Dylan as his generation’s finest songwriter, but including the “singer of songs” bit is maybe a little surprising, especially when you factor in the former’s own healthy ego about CSN’s magical voices. Still, it’s a safe assumption that without Bob, the musical directions of Nash, Crosby, Stills, Young, and Mitchell would have been dramatically different, and so, credit is given where it’s due; through Graham Nash’s lens, the Laurel Canyon sound owed a great deal to Bob Dylan.
Related Topics
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.