Robert Frank

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Robert Frank
Born(1924-11-09)November 9, 1924
Zürich, Switzerland
DiedSeptember 9, 2019(2019-09-09) (aged 94)
NationalitySwiss-American
Known forPhotography, film directing
Notable workThe Americans
Spouse(s)Mary Frank (divorced)
June Leaf
Children2

Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019) was a Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ ... ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century."[1] Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.[2]

Background and early photography career

Frank was born in Zürich, Switzerland, the son of Rosa (Zucker) and Hermann Frank. His family was

fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar.[6][5]

In 1949, the new editor of Camera magazine, Walter Laubli (1902–1991), published a substantial portfolio of Jakob Tuggener pictures made at upper-class entertainments and in factories, alongside the work of the 25 year-old Frank who had just returned to his native Switzerland after two years abroad, with pages including some of his first pictures from New York. The magazine promoted the two as representatives of the 'new photography' of Switzerland.[7]

Tuggener was a role model for the younger artist, first mentioned to him by Frank's boss and mentor, Zurich commercial photographer Michael Wolgensinger (1913–1990) who understood that Frank was unsuited to the more mercenary application of the medium. Tuggener, as a serious artist who had left the commercial world behind, was the "one Frank really did love, from among all Swiss photographers," according to Guido Magnaguagno and Fabrik, as a photo book, was a model for Frank's Les Américains ('The Americans') published ten years later in Paris by Delpire, in 1958.[8]

He soon left to travel in South America and Europe. He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru, and returned to the U.S. in 1950. That year was momentous for Frank, who, after meeting Edward Steichen, participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); he also married fellow artist Mary Frank née Mary Lockspeiser, with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo.[9]

Though he was initially optimistic about the United States' society and culture, Frank's perspective quickly changed as he confronted the fast pace of American life and what he saw as an overemphasis on money. He now saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a perspective that became evident in his later photography. Frank's own dissatisfaction with the control that editors exercised over his work also undoubtedly colored his experience. He continued to travel, moving his family briefly to Paris.

Vogue, and Fortune. Associating with other contemporary photographers such as Saul Leiter and Diane Arbus, he helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers (not to be confused with the New York School of art) during the 1940s and 1950s.[5]

In 1955, Frank achieved further recognition with the inclusion by Edward Steichen of seven of his photographs (many more than most other contributors) in the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man that was to be seen by 9 million visitors and with a popular catalogue that is still in print.[10] Frank's contributions had been taken in Spain (of a woman kissing her swaddled babe-in-arms); of a bowed old woman in Peru; a rheumy-eyed miner in Wales; and the others in England and the US, including two (one atypically soft-focus) of his wife in pregnancy; and one (later to be included in The Americans) of six laughing women in the window of the White Tower Hamburger Stand on Fourteenth Street, New York City.[11]

The Americans

Inspired by fellow Swiss

Salt Lake City, Utah; Butte, Montana; and Chicago, Illinois.[18] He took his family along with him for part of his series of road trips over the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 shots. 83 of these were selected by him for publication in The Americans.[19]

Frank's journey was not without incident. He later recalled the anti-Semitism to which he was subject in a small Arkansas town. "I remember the guy [policeman] took me into the police station, and he sat there and put his feet on the table. It came out that I was Jewish because I had a letter from the Guggenheim Foundation. They really were primitive." He was told by the sheriff, "Well, we have to get somebody who speaks Yiddish." ... "They wanted to make a thing out of it. It was the only time it happened on the trip. They put me in jail. It was scary. Nobody knew where I was."[20] Elsewhere in the South, he was told by a sheriff that he had "an hour to leave town." Those incidents may have contributed to the dark view of America found in the work.[21]

Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Frank met

Beat writer Jack Kerouac "at a New York party where poets and Beatniks were," and showed him the photographs from his travels.[19] However, according to Joyce Johnson, Kerouac's lover at the time, she met Frank while waiting for Kerouac to emerge from a conference with his editors, at Viking Press, looked at Frank's portfolio, and introduced them to each other.[22] Kerouac immediately told Frank, "Sure I can write something about these pictures." He eventually contributed the introduction to the U.S. edition of The Americans. Frank also became lifelong friends with Allen Ginsberg, and was one of the main visual artists to document the Beat subculture, which felt an affinity with Frank's interest in documenting the tensions between the optimism of the 1950s and the realities of class and racial differences. The irony that Frank found in the gloss of American culture and wealth over this tension gave his photographs a clear contrast to those of most contemporary American photojournalists, as did his use of unusual focus, low lighting and cropping that deviated from accepted photographic techniques.[19]

This divergence from contemporary photographic standards gave Frank difficulty at first in securing an American publisher. Les Américains was first published in 1958 by Robert Delpire in Paris, as part of its Encyclopédie Essentielle series, with texts by Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck that Delpire positioned opposite Frank's photographs.[23] It was finally published in 1959 in the United States, without the texts, by Grove Press, where it initially received substantial criticism. Popular Photography, for one, derided his images as "meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness." Though sales were also poor at first, the fact that the introduction was by the popular Kerouac helped it reach a larger audience. Over time and through its inspiration of later artists, The Americans became a seminal work in American photography and art history, and is the work with which Frank is most clearly identified. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said "it is impossible to imagine photography's recent past and overwhelmingly confusing present without his lingeringly pervasive presence." and that The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ . . . ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century."[1]

In 1961, Frank received his first individual show, entitled Robert Frank: Photographer, at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also showed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962.[24]

The French Journal Les Cahiers de la photographie devoted special issues 11 and 12 in 1983 to discussion of Robert Frank as a gesture of admiration for, and complicity with, his work, also to set forth his critical capacity as an artist.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of The Americans, a new edition was released worldwide on May 30, 2008.[25] For this new edition from Steidl, most photographs are uncropped (in contrast to the cropped versions in previous editions), and two photographs are replaced with those of the same subject but from an alternate perspective.[26][27]

A celebratory exhibit of The Americans, titled Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, was displayed in 2009 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.[28] The second section of the four-section, 2009, SFMOMA[29] exhibition displays Frank's original application to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (which funded the primary work on The Americans project), along with vintage contact sheets, letters to photographer Walker Evans and author Jack Kerouac, and two early manuscript versions of Kerouac's introduction to the book. Also exhibited were three collages (made from more than 115 original rough work prints) that were assembled under Frank's supervision in 2007 and 2008, revealing his intended themes as well as his first rounds of image selection. An accompanying book, also titled Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, was published,[21] the most in-depth examination of any photography book ever, at 528 pages. While working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jason Eskenazi asked other noted photographers visiting the Looking In exhibition to choose their favorite image from The Americans and explain their choice, resulting in the book, By the Glow of the Jukebox: The Americans List.[30]

Films

By the time The Americans was published in the United States in 1959, Frank had moved away from photography to concentrate on filmmaking. Among his films was the 1959

Village Voice that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank, who shot the film with professional lighting.[31]

In 1960, Frank was staying in Pop artist George Segal's basement while filming The Sin of Jesus with a grant from Walter K. Gutman. Isaac Babel's story was transformed to center on a woman working on a chicken farm in New Jersey. It was originally supposed to be filmed in six weeks in and around New Brunswick, but Frank ended up shooting for six months.

Frank's 1972 documentary of the

Rolling Stones, Cocksucker Blues, is arguably his best known film. The film shows the Stones on tour, engaging in heavy drug use and group sex. Frank said of the Stones, "It was great to watch them — the excitement. But my job was after the show. What I was photographing was a kind of boredom. It's so difficult being famous. It's a horrendous life. Everyone wants to get something from you."[19] Mick Jagger reportedly told Frank, "It's a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we'll never be allowed in the country again." The Stones sued to prevent the film's release, and it was disputed whether Frank as the artist or the Stones as those who hired the artist owned the copyright. A court order restricted the film to being shown no more than five times per year, and only in the presence of Frank.[32] Frank's photography also appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stones' album Exile on Main St..[33]

Other films by Frank include Me and My Brother, Keep Busy, and Candy Mountain (the last was co-directed with Rudy Wurlitzer).[34][35]

Later life and death

Though Frank continued to be interested in film and video, he returned to still images in the 1970s, publishing his second photographic book, The Lines of My Hand, in 1972. This work has been described as a "visual autobiography", and consists largely of personal photographs. However, he largely gave up "straight" photography to instead create narratives out of constructed images and collages, incorporating words and multiple frames of images that were directly scratched and distorted on the negatives. None of this later work has achieved an impact comparable to that of The Americans. As some critics have pointed out, this is perhaps because Frank began playing with constructed images more than a decade after Robert Rauschenberg introduced his silkscreen composites—in contrast to The Americans, Frank's later images simply were not beyond the pale of accepted technique and practice by that time.[36]

Frank and Mary separated in 1969.[37] He remarried, to sculptor June Leaf, and in 1971, moved to the community of Mabou, Nova Scotia in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia in Canada.[37] In 1974, his daughter, Andrea, was killed in a plane crash in Tikal, Guatemala. Also around this time, his son, Pablo, was first hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Much of Frank's subsequent work dealt with the impact of the loss of both his daughter and subsequently his son, who died in an Allentown, Pennsylvania hospital in 1994. In 1995, in memory of his daughter he founded the Andrea Frank Foundation, which provides grants to artists.[5]

After his move to Nova Scotia, Canada, Frank divided his time between his home there, in a former fisherman's shack on the coast, and his Bleecker Street loft in New York. He acquired a reputation for being a recluse (particularly since the death of Andrea), declining most interviews and public appearances. He continued to accept eclectic assignments, however, such as photographing the 1984 Democratic National Convention, and directing music videos for artists such as New Order ("Run"), and Patti Smith ("Summer Cannibals"). Frank produced both films and still images, and helped organize several retrospectives of his art. His work has been represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York since 1984.[38] In 1994, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. presented the most comprehensive retrospective of Frank's work to date, entitled Moving Out.[39]

Frank died on September 9, 2019, at his home in Nova Scotia.[40][41]

Publications

Publications by Frank

Critical studies, reviews and biographies

Films


Filmography

List of films
Year Name Notes
1959 Pull My Daisy with Alfred Leslie. Adapted from a Jack Kerouac play, starring Allen Ginsberg.[31]
1961 The Sin of Jesus [46]
1963 O.K. End Here [47]
1965/1968 Me and My Brother A film about Julius Orlovsky (Peter Orlovsky's brother) and his mental illness.[34]
1969 Conversations in Vermont [48][49]
1969 Life-Raft Earth [50]
1971 About Me: A Musical [51]
1972 Cocksucker Blues controversial film about the Rolling Stones' 1972 tour.[32]
1975 Keep Busy with Rudy Wurlitzer.[52][53]
1980 Life Dances On [54][55]
1981 Energy and How to Get It with Rudy Wurlitzer.[56]
1983 This Song For Jack [57]
1985 Home Improvements [58]
1988 Candy Mountain with Rudy Wurlitzer.[35]
1989 Hunter [59]
1990 C'est vrai! (One Hour) [60]
1992 Last Supper [61]
1994 Moving Pictures [62][63]
2002 Paper Route [64]
2004/2008 True Story (Kurzfilm) [de] [65]

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions (selected)

Group exhibitions (selected)

Awards

References

  1. ^ a b O'Hagan, Sean (November 7, 2014). "Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won't look back". The Guardian. Retrieved December 27, 2014.
  2. ^ Gefter, Philip (September 10, 2019). "Robert Frank Dies; Pivotal Documentary Photographer Was 94". The New York Times. Retrieved September 10, 2019.
  3. .
  4. ^ Documentary film, Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank. Produced and Directed by Gerald Fox. 2004. Greenwich Entertainment.
  5. ^ . Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  6. ^ "Influential photographer Robert Frank dies at 94". BBC News. September 10, 2019. Retrieved September 12, 2019 – via bbc.co.uk.
  7. .
  8. . Retrieved January 4, 2018.
  9. ^ Steichen, Edward; Sandburg, Carl; Norman, Dorothy (1955). Mason, Jerry (ed.). The family of man : the photographic exhibition. Steichen, Edward (organizer); Lionni, Leo (book designer); Stoller, Ezra (photographer). Published for the Museum of Modern Art by Simon and Schuster in collaboration with the Maco Magazine Corporation.
  10. ^
  11. ^ Brandt, Bill (1936), The English at home, C. Scribner's sons ; London : B.T. Batsford
  12. ^ Tom Maloney U. S. Camera 1958. U. S. Camera Publishing, New York, 1957, p.115
  13. ^ a b "Robert Frank". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved July 5, 2015.
  14. ^ Lane, Anthony (September 14, 2009). "Road Show: The journey of Robert Frank's "The Americans."". The New Yorker. Retrieved December 27, 2014.
  15. ^ a b c d e Dawidoff, Nicholas (July 14, 2012). "The Man Who Saw America". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved September 15, 2015.
  16. ^ Gefter, Philip (December 12, 2008). "Snapshots from the American Road."The New York Times. Retrieved July 5, 2015.
  17. ^
  18. ^ Johnson, Joyce. "'You Got Eyes': Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank's Shared Vision". NYR Daily. The New York Review of Books. Retrieved June 26, 2020.
  19. ^ Ladd, Jeffrey (May 9, 2012). "Master of the Photobook: Robert Delpire's Long and Legendary Influence". Time. Retrieved September 14, 2015.
  20. ^ a b c Robert Frank: Photos, Art Institute of Chicago; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  21. ^ "The Americans – Robert Frank". Steidl Verlag. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  22. ^ Robert Frank The Americans ARTBOOK | D.A.P. 2008 Catalog Steidl Books Exhibition Catalogues 9783865215840. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  23. ^ "A Glimpse at the Robert Frank Publishing Project". photoeye.com. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  24. ^ "Robert Frank: The Americans". Steidl.
  25. ^ "Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans"". San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved December 27, 2014.
  26. ^ .
  27. ^ a b "The Trouble With 'Cocksucker Blues'". Rolling Stone. Retrieved January 4, 2018.
  28. ^ Gerber, Brady (August 3, 2015). "Robert Frank: The Photographer Behind 'Exile On Main St.'". Headphone Nation. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  29. ^ a b "Movie Review: 'Me and My Brother' Opens". The New York Times. 1969. Retrieved January 4, 2018.
  30. ^ a b James, Caryn (June 10, 1988). "Movie Review, Hitting the Highway". The New York Times. Retrieved January 4, 2018.
  31. ^ "Robert Frank, the Godfather of Snapshot Photography and a Pioneer of Everyday Realism, Has Died at Age 94". artnet News. September 10, 2019. Retrieved September 10, 2019.
  32. ^ a b "Photographer Robert Frank Is Dead at 94". Vogue. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  33. ^ "Art: Evoking the World of Some Great Painters", The New York Times
  34. S2CID 192427109
    .
  35. ^ Gefter, Phillip (September 10, 2019). "Robert Frank Dies; Pivotal Documentary Photographer Was 94". The New York Times. Retrieved September 10, 2019.
  36. ISSN 0261-3077
    . Retrieved September 10, 2019 – via www.theguardian.com.
  37. ^ "Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans". nga.gov. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  38. Harper's
    . Vol. 320, no. 1916. pp. 67–73.
  39. ^ Turan, Kenneth (July 28, 2016). "'Don't Blink — Robert Frank' profiles one of America's most iconic, idiosyncratic photographers". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved October 25, 2016.
  40. ^ Young, Deborah (March 2, 2005). "Leaving Home, Coming Home – A Portrait Of Robert Frank". Variety. Retrieved September 27, 2023.
  41. ^ "The Sin of Jesus – Robert Frank – The Film-Makers' Cooperative". film-makerscoop.com. 1961. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  42. ^ "O.K. END HERE". Library of Congress. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  43. ^ Coney, John (1969). "Conversations in Vermont". Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  44. ^ "Conversations in Vermont IDFA". IDFA. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  45. ^ "Life-raft Earth". www.mfah.org. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  46. ^ "About Me: A Musical". www.mfah.org. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  47. ^ Hopkinson, Amanda (September 10, 2019). "Robert Frank obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  48. ^ "Keep Busy". www.mfah.org. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  49. ^ "Robert Frank, Influential Photographer Who Evocatively Chronicled Life in America, Dies at 94". Time. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  50. ^ "Life Dances On". www.mfah.org. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  51. ^ "Energy and How to Get It". International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  52. ^ "THIS SONG FOR JACK". Library of Congress. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  53. ^ "Robert Frank. Home Improvements. 1985". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  54. ^ "Robert Frank. Hunter. 1989". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  55. ^ "Robert Frank. C'est Vrai (One Hour). 1990". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  56. ^ "Robert Frank. Last Supper. 1992". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  57. ^ "Portail du film documentaire". film-documentaire.fr. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  58. ^ "The Portable Robert Frank". bordercrossingsmag.com. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  59. ^ "Paper Route". International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  60. ^ „Hauptpreis, dotiert mit EUR 3.500“
  61. ^ Ausstellungen 1976 (Exhibitions 1976), Kunsthaus Zurich; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  62. ^ Robert Frank. The Americans, Jan Kesner Gallery; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  63. ^ See de:Hasselblad Foundation Award.
  64. ^ Robert Frank: London/Wales, Corcoran Gallery of Art; retrieved: November 24, 2022.
  65. ^ Robert Frank: Storylines, Tate London; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  66. ^ Robert Frank. Storylines, Fotomuseum Winterthur; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  67. ^ Robert Frank im Museum Folkwang Essen, Ruhr-Guide. Onlinemagazine für das Ruhrgebiet, published on April 22, 2008; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
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  69. ^ Robert Frank. Die Filme. Retrospektive, C/O Berlin Foundation; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  70. ^ Exhibitions Archive, Appleton Museum of Art; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  71. ^ Robert Frank. From the collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur, Multimedia Art Museum Moscow; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  72. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts
    ; retrieved June 24, 2017.
  73. ^ Sabine Buchwald: Die anarchische Kraft des Fotografen. In der Akademie der Bildenden Künste sind Robert Franks Bilder als gigantische Wandzeitung zu sehen. Der Katalog dazu ist eine besondere SZ, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, Nr. 270, 24. November 2014, Seite R4.
  74. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
    vom 9. April 2015, S. 38.
  75. ^ "360°-Panorama der Ausstellung" (in German). Retrieved March 21, 2016.
  76. ^ Robert Frank: Books and Films, 1947–2016, Museum der Moderne Salzburg; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  77. ^ Robert Frank Archived October 30, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, Heinrich Gebert Kulturstiftung Appenzell; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  78. ^ "Museum of Modern Art. 'The Family of Man' Master Checklist" (PDF).
  79. ^ "The Family of Man, Museum of Modern Art press release" (PDF).
  80. ^ "Photographs by Callahan and Frank at Museum of Modern Art" (PDF). Museum of Modern Art. January 30, 1962. Retrieved September 12, 2019.
  81. ^ Cruel and Tender. Fotografie und das Wirkliche (Cruel and Tender. Photography and the true), Kunst und Kultur; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  82. ^ Cold Play – Set 1 aus der Sammlung des Fotomuseums Winterthur (Cold Play – Set 1 from the collection of the Fotomuseums Winterthur), Fotomuseum Winterthur; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  83. ^ I Wanna Be Loved By You: Photographs of Marilyn Monroe from the Leon and Michaela Constantiner Collection, Brooklyn Museum of Art; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  84. ^ American Beauty. Photographs of the American Social Landscape 1930s–1970s, National Gallery of Victoria; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  85. ^ Some Tribes, Christophe Guye Galerie; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  86. ^ Street Art, Street Life: From 1950s to Now, Bronx Museum of the Arts; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  87. ^ Staff Picks 2010, Howard Greenberg Gallery; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  88. ^ Humanos. Acciones, Historia y Fotografía, Centro de Arte Alcobendas; retrieved: June 24, 2017.
  89. ^ "Robert Frank". Hasselblad Foundation. Retrieved December 26, 2014.
  90. ^ "Medal Day History". MacDowell Colony. Archived from the original on August 6, 2012. Retrieved November 20, 2015.
  91. ^ "MacDowell Medal winners 1960–2011". London: The Daily Telegraph. April 13, 2011. Retrieved November 20, 2015.
  92. ^ "Doctor of Fine Arts Honoris Causa of NSCAD University". Steidl Verlag. Retrieved October 14, 2017.

Sources

  • Philip Gefter, Snapshots From The American Road, The New York Times, December 14, 2008.

Further reading

Bibliographies

External links