Robert Frank
(From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia)
Robert Frank (born November
9, 1924), born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American
photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photographic book
titled simply The Americans, was heavily influential in the post-war
period, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for
his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American society. Frank later
expanded into film and video and experimented with compositing and
manipulating photographs.
Frank was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Switzerland. Frank's mother,
Rosa, was Swiss, but his father, Hermann, had become stateless after World
War I and had to apply for the Swiss citizenship of Frank and his older
brother, Manfred. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland
during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his
understanding of oppression. He turned to photography in part as a means
to escape the confines of his business-oriented family and home, and
trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before he created
his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946. Frank
emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City
as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar. 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 Lockspeiser, with whom he had two
children, Andrea and Pablo.
Though he was initially optimistic about the United States, 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 editors
exercised over his work also undoubtedly colored his experience. He
continued to travel, moving his family briefly to Paris. In 1953, he
returned to New York and continued to work as a freelance photojournalist
for magazines including McCall's, Vogue, and Fortune.
With the aid of his major artistic influence, the photographer Walker
Evans, Frank secured a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph its
society at all strata. 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. Only 83 of those were finally selected by him for
publication in The Americans. Frank's journey was not without incident.
While driving through Arkansas, Frank was arbitrarily thrown in jail after
being stopped by the police; elsewhere in the South, he was told by a
sheriff that he had "an hour to leave town."
Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Frank met Beat writer Jack
Kerouac on the sidewalk outside a party and showed him the photographs
from his travels. Kerouac immediately told Frank "Sure I can write
something about these pictures," and he 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 Frank's
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.
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, and finally in 1959 in
the United States 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, Kerouac's introduction
helped it reach a larger audience because of the popularity of the Beat
phenomenon. Over time and through its inspiration of later artists, The
Americans became a seminal work in American photography and art history,
and is considered the work with which Frank is most clearly identified. In
1961, Frank received his first individual show, entitled Robert Frank:
Photographer, at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also showed at MoMA in
New York in 1962.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of The
Americans, a new edition will be released worldwide on May 15, 2008.
Robert Frank discussed with his publisher, Gerhard Steidl, the idea of
producing a new edition using modern scanning and the finest tritone
printing. The starting point was to bring original prints from New York to
Göttingen, Germany, where Steidl is based. In July 2007, Frank visited
Göttingen. A new format for the book was worked out and new typography
selected. A new cover was designed and Frank chose the book cloth, foil
embossing and the endpaper. Most significantly, as he has done for every
edition of The Americans, Frank changed the cropping of many of the
photographs, usually including more information. Two images were changed
completely from the original 1958 and 1959 editions. A celebratory exhibit
of The Americans will be displayed in 2009 at the National Gallery of Art
in Washington D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The new edition is published by
Steidl and National Gallery of Art, Washington, and will be available in
North America through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers .
By that time, however, Frank had moved
away from photography to concentrate on making films. Among them was the
1959 Pull My Daisy, which was written and narrated by Kerouac and starred
Ginsberg and others from the Beat circle. The Beat philosophy emphasized
spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown
together or even improvised. Pull My Daisy was accordingly praised for
years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Frank's co-director, Alfred
Leslie, revealed in a November 28, 1968 article in the Village Voice that
the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him
and Frank, who shot the film with professional lighting.
In 1960, Frank was staying in Fluxus artist George Segal's basement while
filming 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.
His 1972 documentary of the Rolling Stones, Cocksucker Blues, is arguably
his best known film. The film shows the Stones while on their '72 tour,
engaging in heavy drug use and group sex. Perhaps more disturbing to the
Stones when they saw the finished product, however, was the degree to
which Frank faithfully captured the loneliness and despair of life on the
road. 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
actually owned the copyright. A court order resolved this with Solomonic
wisdom by restricting the film to being shown no more than five times per
year and only in the presence of Frank. Franks' photography also appeared
on the cover of the Rolling Stones' album Exile on Main St..
Other films by Robert Frank include "Keep Busy" and "Candy Mountain" which
he co-directed with Rudy Wurlitzer.
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 or notoriety comparable to
that which The Americans achieved. 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.
Frank and Mary separated in 1969. 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. In 1974, tragedy struck when 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 has dealt with the impact
of the loss of both his daughter and subsequently his son, who died in an
Allentown, PA hospital in 1994. In 1995, he founded the Andrea Frank
Foundation, which provides grants to artists.
Since his move to Nova Scotia, Canada, Frank has 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 has acquired a reputation for being a
recluse (particularly since the death of Andrea), declining most
interviews and public appearances. He has 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 continues to produce
both films and still images, and has helped organize several
retrospectives of his art. In 1994, the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, DC presented the most comprehensive retrospective of Frank's
work to date, entitled Moving Out. Frank was awarded the prestigious
Hasselblad Award for photography in 1996. His 1997 award exhibition at the
Hasselblad Center in Goteborg, Sweden was entitled Flamingo, as was the
accompanying published catalog.
He is currently represented by the Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York.
