Brian Graham took this picture of two artists – Raoul Hague and Robert Frank – at Hague’s cabin on Old Maverick Road in Woodstock, New York, in 1988. Hague, an abstract sculptor working mainly in wood, was a friend and mentor to Frank, whose 1958 coast to coast journey, The Americans, had been a landmark in documentary photography. The picture is included in Graham’s new book, Goin’ Down the Road With Robert Frank, about the photographer. Frank died in 2019 aged 94.
Graham’s memoir is a personal homage to Frank’s influence and an intimate pictorial history of his later years. Graham met the older photographer in the late 1970s when he had spent a couple of years working on oil rigs and was looking for a change of life. Frank bought him a camera and some film and subsequently worked with him for a decade “in and out of the darkroom”.
Frank divided those years between a ramshackle home on Bleecker Street in New York and a house on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in Graham’s native Canada.
Both places look a little like lost worlds through Graham’s lens: dusty and beaten-up rooms and yards in which Frank’s wild-haired friends from different bohemias, Allen Ginsberg and Tom Waits and Jim Jarmusch, come and go. Hague’s cabin feels emblematic of that spirit, eccentric and homebuilt and full of life. In a diary note in the book, Graham recalls visits to that cabin, remembering how Hague described to him walking home 13 miles in the winter from the public libraries where he went to read. “Raoul kept scrapbooks and enjoyed showing me pictures of snow storms taken around the time he returned home from bypass surgery,” he wrote. “Back in New York, I imagine Hague forever in a snow globe.”
