Authors: Graham Nash
“Croz alone, 1984”
(© 1988 Graham Nash)
W
HOEVER THOUGHT, AT THIS POINT IN MY LIFE
, I’d be turning my attention to fine-art photography.
In 1970, when
Déjà Vu
was released,
Mac Holbert was a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz and had gone on a field trip to Verde Valley in Sedona, Arizona, living in a tent with a bunch of pals. At the time, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were on the cover of
Rolling Stone.
These college kids had a copy of the issue, and, while smokin’ it and getting a little drunk, started arguing about whether or not we’d sold out. Mac, who was a devoted fan, defended us, which only aggravated the situation. Things escalated, as those things tend to do, so at some point, he packed up and left and thumbed a ride back to San Francisco. On the way, he got picked up by
Steve Cohen, of all people—the guy who handled our stage lighting. Steve was on his way back from Woodstock with my guitars in the van, and Mac came with them and stayed in my life for over forty years.
I liked Mac immediately. He was a bright, artistic kid, funny and self-assured. Great attention to detail, very grounded. Loved photography, played a damn good game of Ping-Pong. I took him under my wing, introduced him to everyone, who felt about him much as I did, and eventually Mac became the tour manager for Crosby, Stills & Nash, as well as one of my best friends.
One evening in 1988, Mac and I were having dinner with
David Coons, who worked at Disney (and later got an Oscar for developing
the software that created the ballroom scene in
Beauty and the Beast
). A brilliant man who to this day can’t find the bathroom in my house. David spotted a green Kodak photographic-paper box sitting on my desk and asked what was in it. My explanation requires a little backstory. CSN’s art director,
Gary Burden, was doing a book on Joni and wanted to use some of my photographs. He knew I’d lived with Joni and that I’d have some pretty interesting shots of her. Without having the discipline to go through my 35 mm negatives, I simply scooped up everything I had from my first years of shooting images in America—David, Stephen, Neil, Joni, Cass, Woodstock,
everything
—and gave them to him. Of course, I never saw them again. “But I put them on the Greyhound bus,” Gary insisted. “You mean you didn’t get them?” So this green Kodak box contained all that remained of my work: the proof sheets from those treasured negatives, which were themselves missing.
“Are there any images on them that you really like?” David Coons asked. After I pointed out a favorite shot of Crosby, he said, “Would you lend me the proof sheet?”
Damn!
I thought: Am I going to lose the proof sheet, too? But he convinced me that he’d take special care of it, so I let him have it, with misgivings.
Ten days later, I got it back along with a twenty-by-thirty-inch print of Croz that knocked me on my ass. It stunned me. It was beautiful: the black-to-white relationship, the texture of the three-hundred-pound cold-press Arches museum-quality paper. I happen to be a great lover of surfaces and of old photographic processes—Bromoils, carboprints, dry plates, daguerreotypes, platinum prints, the works. I wasn’t sure which process David had used, but the result just
killed
me.
“I didn’t know you had a darkroom that could make prints this big,” I told him.
“It’s not a photograph,” he said.
I got indignant. “Of course it is. I ought to know—I
took
it.”
He said, “No, it’s an
ink-jet print.” It was the first time I’d ever heard that term. “At Disney, to make proofs of images of people, we use a 3047 printing machine, developed by
Iris Graphics, out of New Bedford, Massachusetts.”
I was astounded. “You mean to tell me this image was
printed by a machine
?” It seemed impossible—sacrilege.
Mac and I went to take a look at this … machine. It was blue and looked like a low-rise refrigerator but had a slope on one side, with a window so you could see into it. On the other side of the glass was a huge spinning drum. When it slowed and finally stopped, a man removed an image of a bride holding flowers, but it was … a
photograph.
Mac and I looked at each other and said, “Did we just see that?”
I’d been putting off an exhibition of my photographs that Joni helped arrange at the Parco Gallery in Japan because I couldn’t supply what the curator needed: fifty images (no problem) in editions of twenty-five each (no problem) blown up to a size of three feet by four feet (big problem). The minute I saw the Iris printer, that problem was solved. It could easily print the show for Tokyo.
I got hold of
Al Luchessi, the CEO of Iris Graphics, who happened to be in LA at the time. He explained how his printer was about to revolutionize the way companies advertised. “Say you want a Toyota brochure printed,” he said. “You’d normally take the information to a printing house. They’d have several printers half the size of a room, which they’d have to shut down, clean, and re-ink in the process until Toyota was satisfied enough to sign off for a million copies.” By scanning the images into a computer and programming the Iris to print them, it took about forty minutes and cost $100 instead of taking three days and costing $7,000. The companies understood the economics very quickly.
Mac and I could barely contain ourselves. We saw the potential immediately. I took Al Luchessi aside and told him that we were sure he could make more money printing fine art than he could
printing advertising. I already knew he could get high-grade paper stock through the machine because of the image of Crosby that
David Coons had printed.
So I shelled out $126,000 and bought the machine instantly.
Mac and I carted it back to my house in Manhattan Beach, and Mac and Coons voided the warranty within the first ten minutes because we were fucking with the insides, forcing it to do what we wanted it to do. The machine spits out millions of dots of ink; each nozzle on the four print heads—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—is about one-seventh the width of a human hair. When you put fine-art paper through the machine, it throws off a lot of microscopic lint, each piece of which looks like a tree trunk to the minute printer nozzles. First we cut off the arm that was holding the printer heads close to the print drum, moving them back to allow even thicker paper to go through. Then we borrowed a piece of tubing from the Hoover of Mac’s wife, Ruthann, to create a vacuum system that would suck off the lint before it reached the print heads. The last step was having the brilliant David Coons rewrite conversion software from color to black-and-white.
It took no time to print the show for Tokyo, all fifty images, and they were
gorgeous.
It seemed a shame to let that machine sit idle while CSN was on a tour in Australia, so Mac invited a master serigrapher named
Jack Duganne to play with it until we got back. The process for printing serigraphs is tedious and expensive. The artist often has to print the work a hundred times, overlapping layers of ink until the colors and images are right. But the Iris reduced the processing time by 50 percent, which made the job much more profitable. At some point, Jack received an image from a Chinese artist that he scanned and printed the same size as the original and sent it back to the artist as a gift. She was somewhat insulted, thinking that Jack hadn’t liked the image, so she tore it up, believing it was the original. But of course it wasn’t; Jack still had the original. That’s how good our prints were getting.
Charlie Wehrenberg, an artist friend of mine from San Francisco, suggested we turn this into a business, becoming a fine-art press, printing the individual images of artists in many visual media.
Steve Boulter, of
Iris Graphics, and
David Coons helped us realize the dream.
Presto
,
Nash Editions was born. It was a hell of an undertaking, necessitating that I pump almost $2 million into the new company. So in 1990, I auctioned off most of my incredible collection of photography at Sotheby’s for $2.6 million, the highest ever paid for a private collection, giving Nash Editions the cash infusion it needed.
Convincing artists to utilize the technology was somewhat more difficult. They came to it slowly and with great suspicion, as did collectors, curators, and gallery owners, who initially balked at displaying the prints we made. Once, while I was in San Francisco, I walked into the Vision Gallery. I was about to have an exhibition of my work there and I wanted to show them a couple of my images. The lady who managed the place loved them. “The blacks are like velvet,” she said. “You must have a wonderful darkroom.” “They’re not photographs, they’re ink-jet prints,” I explained.
Clang!
She immediately hated them. It took me an hour to convince her that it wasn’t how you got them on paper—it’s what you see, the entire experience. Do you like them? Do they affect you or not?
David Hockney felt the same way as she did—at first. Soon, however, we began printing for him, as well as for great photographers like Douglas Kirkland, Pedro Meyer, Robert Heinecken and his wife, Joyce Neimanas, and painters like William Mathews, Francisco Clemente, and Jamie Wyeth.
Our studio was doing incredible work.
Henry Wilhelm, who wrote the definitive book on the degradation of color images, said that the same image printed by another company wasn’t as good—that the Nash Editions prints were at least 20 percent more valuable, thanks in no small part to Christine Pan Abbe, our office manager, and
John Bilotta, who’s been our master printer for the last twenty-odd years. We had our own identifying chop, and we
bought more Iris printers, with at least three of those beasts in our studio at one point.
Sad to say,
Iris Graphics did not treat me and Mac, two hippies from California, very well. They did not truly believe in what we were doing. They believe in us
now
; perhaps they should have from the beginning because they’re out of business
now.
But other people saw the future coming, particularly Epson. In the early days, Epson’s images were rather crude. To improve their image quality, they relied heavily on Mac and me to keep the technology moving forward. They’ve always been receptive, and we’ve been using Epson printers for the last eighteen years. We’ve printed images on all kinds of stock—rice paper, white velvet, tin, you name it. We really pushed this technique as far as we could, which is why we are so honored that our original Nash Editions printer is in the
Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. They recognized what we accomplished and awarded us the gold medal for technological achievement. We changed the history of photography—just a little. My father would be so proud. From those humble beginning lessons, to this.
Wow.
In September 1992, I was attending Photokina, a large photography convention in Cologne, Germany, when Susan called. She told me about the devastation caused by
Hurricane Iniki, which had struck the Hawaiian islands. She urged me to consider doing a benefit concert. Susan’s personal response to the storm was immediate. She flew to the islands, rented a helicopter in Maui, filled it with the necessary provisions—lamps, generators, chain saws, etc.—and flew to
Kauai. She was the first civilian to get permission to do so. Stills had put her in touch with one of the commanding officers of the Pacific Fleet and he gave his permission for her to land on the island despite the terrifying conditions. Of course, once the thought of helping was in my head, I expanded the idea. I always want to push a great idea to the absolute limit. I called my friend
Tom Campbell, head of the
Guacamole Fund in Southern California, and suggested that we rally the troops. I knew how committed Jackson
Browne and
Bonnie Raitt were to making the world a better place, so we called them to ask for their help. I also knew that David and Stephen would support the idea of helping out the people affected by the devastating storm. And so, together, we performed an acoustic concert at the Blaisdell Arena in Honolulu and one on
Kauai with Jimmy Buffett. We raised over $1 million—giving every dollar to the Hawaiian people. I’m so proud of Susan for spearheading the event. She and our friend Mimsy Bouret took great care to make certain that every cent went to help the people in greatest need.
The year after Iniki, the islands had recovered from the devastation and I found myself sitting at a piano and vocal mike that had been set up in the telephone company offices in Lihue, Kauai. I was linked via ISDN, a then-new digital telephone technology, to
Joel Bernstein, who was playing along with me live from a stage set up at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, where the audience of AT&T telephone engineers watched me through a video linkup. This was the first instance of a simultaneous live musical performance carried via digital telephone lines.
I’ve always been fascinated by technology and its global reach. The essence of “Teach Your Children” is about passing along, on a two-way street, knowledge and insight, a mission greatly facilitated by the information superhighway. Any method that enlightens is a move toward greater understanding, making a difference in the world, and new forms of expression—be they interactive multimedia, virtual reality, or digital interface—provide tools that extend our influence to the global village and its children.
But how to take this concept to another, personal dimension? I envisioned a fully interactive computerized stage show, utilizing the latest technology, in which I could talk about my life and all the incredible things that have happened to me. More than anything, however, I wanted it to be thought-provoking and visual, perhaps a new way of teaching our kids.
Our engineer,
Stanley Johnston, led me to
Rand Wetherwax, the ultimate computer geek, who helped me create a database of my life,
from the earliest days—pictures of my granddad, my bedroom in Salford, Clarkie and me at Ordsall Board, that kind of stuff—right up to the present. For the show, however, I wanted to be able to go freely anywhere in my life, not necessarily chronologically. To do that, we needed an interface, a way of accessing the database. So we devised a huge gold watch that moved on a twenty-five-by-thirty-foot screen. It represented the “gold watch theory” of having to do what your dad and grandfather did: working until the owners awarded you a gold watch and replaced you with someone younger and cheaper. I held an infrared remote control that I could click on the watch, causing the hands to spin either forward or backward, landing on a year. This enabled me to go from 1942, the year I was born, all the way through to the early nineties. And once I clicked on a year, other interfaces would appear, and I would talk about, say, listening to Radio Luxembourg. We re-created my bedroom so that young Graham could put his ear to the bedpost, enabling him/me to hear the radio in the kitchen. I made the computer screen image literally move down the bedpost, the Everly Brothers would come up on the radio, and I’d sing “Bye Bye Love” with them in three-part harmony. I then spoke about how important their music was to me.