A Glace Bay man knocked on a famous photographer's door. It led him to a whole new world

When Brian Graham first learned about a world famous photographer who'd recently made Cape Breton Island his second home, he was intrigued, but he wasn't ready to meet Robert Frank just yet.

"I didn't think I had anything to say, tell you the truth," he recalled, on a recent morning from his wife's home in France. "I hadn't done anything."

His new book Goin' Down the Road with Robert Frank, documents their 40-year-long friendship and unlikely working relationship, which began in Mabou, N.S., and continued in New York City after Frank sent him a postcard inviting him to move to the city and offering him a place to stay.

For Graham, who was raised in the mining community of Glace Bay, getting swept up in Frank's world was something he could have never imagined. 

"I was never going to be an artist," he said. "I mean, the best photographer I knew was my aunt." 

Frank, who died in 2019 at the age of 94, was best known for his seminal book of photography, The Americans, which featured 83 photos, culled from tens of thousands, that Frank took on a 1955 road trip across the United States.

The images show a range of people just as Frank found them — whether he was documenting segregation on a city bus in the southern United States years before the dawn of the civil rights movement, or depicting other unsanitized slices of everyday life. 

Frank first arrived in Cape Breton in the early 1970s after purchasing a ramshackle home overlooking the ocean in Mabou with his wife, the artist June Leaf. He spent winters away in New York City and summers in Nova Scotia, a place he came to adore.

"In the city, you're an operator, you're fighting to be at the top, you're afraid that the guy behind you is going to push you away and you know he will. Which is not the case here, you can be more yourself," he said in an interview with CBC News in 1977.

Graham became enamoured with photography after graduating from university in 1973 and moving to Halifax, where he began attending lectures on the subject at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. 

But it wasn't until he spent two years working in the oilsands in Alberta and offshore near Sable Island and the Labrador Sea — gaining what he considered real life experience — that he finally worked up the nerve to knock on Frank's front door in 1979. 

Wary of spooking Frank, he remembers parking far away from his house and making a slow approach on foot. The front door opened, Graham was invited inside and the two men hit it off, with Frank seeing something in Graham that would change his life.

On his next visit, Frank gave Graham a camera he had brought back from New York and told him to practise his craft by taking Polaroids. 

Frank could be mercurial, and sometimes would snap at photographers taking his picture. But when they went outside and Graham pulled out his new camera to take a picture of Frank, something curious happened: he didn't swat the camera away.