Thursday, February 1, 2007 Older Editions

Andover shutter closes: Photographer Graber, 72, dies

By Brian Messenger

What's the ultimate compliment you can give a photographer?

"I've heard many people say the first thing [they'd bring] out of a house fire would be his work," said former town resident Ed Eich.

Eich, a photographer himself, wasn't talking in general terms. He was speaking about Andover's Richard Graber.

Graber, 72, died early Monday morning at the Sunbridge rehabilitation facility in North Reading. He had been a resident there for several years and living with Parkinson's disease for nearly a decade. Graber leaves two daughters, Jennifer, of Andover, and Caelin, of St. Louis, Mo.

Considered by many in town to be Andover's last great documentary photographer, Graber moved to Andover from his birthplace of Goshen, Ind., in the early 1960s. He soon began capturing several decades worth of Andover's history with his unorthodox twin-lens Rolleiflex camera.

"There were very few people like Richard. There's nobody left like Richard these days," said Eich, who operated a photo studio and business out of Andover for over 17 years before closing it down last year. "Richard was the last documentary photographer Andover really had."

"That was kind of his bread and butter - taking family photos and weddings," said Sue Lenoe, who became friends with Graber after their daughters attended elementary school together nearly 40 years ago. "He had an eye."

Eich said Graber drew his influences from documentary photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, not to mention his all-time favorite, Robert Frank, who has ties to Phillips Academy. Graber himself worked as the house photographer for Phillips throughout the 1970s and into the '80s. That's where Eich met Graber. The two soon became friends, sharing a love of photography.

"I knew him photographically," said Eich, who now lives in Cambridge. "Others knew him as one of the most colorful characters in town."

Lenoe, who owns several family photos taking by Graber, said, "I think he was a very gifted photographer who was the right person at the right time to capture the town. And he did it both with the buildings and the settings and the people too."

According to the book "Andover: A Century of Change," Graber began documenting Andover in 1962, when he opened a shop in the Musgrove Building downtown.

Graber's daughters described their father as "inquisitive, intellectual, non-conformist, and creative."

Along with his wife Rachel, who died in 1992, Graber was an activist within the numerous social movements of the tumultuous 1960s, including Vietnam War protests.

"The first protest here was in 1967 and I took pictures," Graber recalled in the book. "About 30 people marched around Lawrence Common. We were scared we were going to get beat up - there were workmen that gathered and sort of glowered at us. We were thankful there were a couple of police around."

Eich said Graber had a gift for capturing the emotion of moments such as those, particularly the emotion of his unsuspecting subjects.

"You hardly ever knew he was using the camera," he said. "I think that was the way he got such great images."

His camera, a German model with twin lenses, no batteries and a backwards projecting image for the photographer, was the kind of camera he started out with at Goshen College, where he was appointed yearbook photographer.

"I had no camera and no skills," Graber told the Townsman in 2000. "One of my friends said the reason I was good was because I didn't know what I was doing. Therefore I couldn't copy anyone."

Said Eich, "I picked up his camera a couple of times, I couldn't even focus the thing. And I worked professionally for 20 years ... He never used a 35 millimeter camera."

"He did it the old-fashioned way, of course. It was all black-and-white photography. He did everything in his basement," said Lenoe.

Graber eventually moved from the Musgrove Building to a Park Street studio, before finally moving the operation into a home studio.

Many of Graber's photos can still be seen at various town establishments, where they hang proudly as testaments to Andover's history.

"I'm the wave of the past," Graber told the Townsman jokingly seven years ago. "There's a high-tech revolution going on, with computer-generated types of stuff, and I don't know anything about it."

While Graber had a reputation of doing things that way he liked, "It was the artist's way. It wasn't so much, 'My way or the highway.' It was the artist's way," Eich said. "He didn't have the ego of a great artist."

Eich described Graber's series of downtown photos from the 1960s as "a history of the town in and of itself."