ROBERT FRANK

BY: Ramona Duoba

On September 9, 2019, documentary photographer Robert Frank died in Nova Scotia. He was 94. Frank, considered one of the most influential photographers, changed the course of 20th century photography. His book, The Americans, was a sharp contrast to our post-war, optimistic view of life. He looked at America through the eyes of an outsider to show us what lies beneath the surface. He revealed a country plagued by racism and inequality.

Frank was born in Switzerland in 1924 to a European Jewish family. His life was fairly secure and the family was protected by Switzerland’s neutrality during World War II. He learned about photography as a young boy and in 1941 began an apprenticeship. In 1947 he boarded a freighter to New York and once there accepted a position with Harper’s Bazaar. A year later he traveled to South America and Europe and returned to New York to begin his American adventure.

With a Guggenheim fellowship, a wife and two kids, Frank crisscrossed the United States. “It’s the first time I had seen segregation,” Frank reflected in the documentary Don’t Blink. The 1955 photo of the trolleys in New Orleans, one of the most celebrated images, shows a segregated society clearly defined by the passengers on the trolley. Two white adults in the front, two white children in the middle and two African American men in the back. The trolley photo was taken just a few weeks before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

His American road trip took two years, covered 10,000 miles, 767 rolls of film and 27,000 images. Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, worked closely with Frank, “Frank also saw novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life-in our cars, diners, and even the road itself.” In the end The Americans consisted of just 83 photos. “When I look at the 83 photographs I chose for the book, I think I really got the essence,” Frank said.

Published in France in 1958 and the following year in the U.S., the book was panned by critics and the art world. The Museum of Modern Art refused to sell it. Greenough told NPR, “it was described as a sad poem by a very sick person.”

Frank deviated from traditional photographic technique; low lighting, cropping and his unusual focus. The grittiness of the factory worker in Detroit, the transvestites in New York City and the stark line between black and white America was unsettling and morose to some. The pictures eventually struck an emotional chord and the book gained popularity. “It surprised me,” Frank revealed in Don’t Blink, referring to his critics. “I’m really glad the book was successful, but it took 10-years, at least”.

He befriended cultural icons like beat writer Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and The Rolling Stones. Kerouac wrote the forward for the American edition saying Frank had, “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the poets of the world.” Images from The Americans made the cover of the Rolling Stones 1972 album Exile on Main Street followed by a Robert Frank documentary of the band that proved too controversial for release.

Frank spent the next 50 years making deeply personal photographs and films that always pushed the boundaries. He did not embrace fame or commercialism and he endured several private tragedies. The death of his daughter, Andrea, in a plane crash in Guatemala in 1974 and 20-years later the death of son Pablo by suicide.

“We are all poorer with his death and without the example of his integrity” shared curator, Greenough. “His fierce commitment to his art, and his constant quest, as he once said, for “less taste and more spirit…less art and more truth.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*PROVOKR has included images from Robert Frank’s The Americans and a short film highlighting the book.