Robert Frank | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1924-11-09)November 9, 1924 Zürich, Switzerland |
| Died | September 9, 2019(2019-09-09) (aged 94) |
| Nationality | Swiss-American |
| Known for | Photography, film directing |
| Notable work | The Americans |
| Spouse(s) | Mary Frank (divorced) June Leaf |
| Children | 2 |
Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019) was aSwiss Americanphotographer anddocumentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titledThe Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-dayde Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. CriticSean O'Hagan, writing inThe Guardian in 2014, saidThe 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]
Frank was born in Zürich, Switzerland, the son of Rosa (Zucker) and Hermann Frank. His family wasJewish.[3] According to Frank, his mother, Rosa (other sources give her name as Regina), had a Swiss passport, while his father, Hermann originating from Frankfurt, Germany, had become stateless after losing his German citizenship as a Jew.[4] They had to apply for the Swiss citizenship of Robert and his older brother, Manfred. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat ofNazism 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.[5] Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as afashion photographer forHarper's Bazaar.[6][5]
In 1949, the new editor ofCamera magazine, Walter Laubli (1902–1991), published a substantial portfolio ofJakob 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 andFabrik, as a photo book, was a model for Frank's Les Américains ('The Americans') published ten years later inParis 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 meetingEdward Steichen, participated in the group show51 American Photographers at theMuseum of Modern Art (MoMA); he also married fellow artistMary Frank (née 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.[5] In 1953, he returned to New York and continued to work as a freelancephotojournalist for magazines includingMcCall's,Vogue, andFortune. Associating with other contemporary photographers such asSaul Leiter andDiane 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 byEdward Steichen of seven of his photographs (many more than most other contributors) in the world-touringMuseum of Modern Art exhibitionThe 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 inThe Americans) of six laughing women in the window of the White Tower Hamburger Stand on Fourteenth Street, New York City.[11]
Inspired by fellow SwissJakob Tuggener's 1943 filmic bookFabrik,[12]Bill Brandt'sThe English at Home (1936),[13] andWalker Evans'sAmerican Photographs[14] (1938),[15] and on the recommendation of Evans (a previous recipient),[16]Alexey Brodovitch,Alexander Leiberman, Edward Steichen, andMeyer Schapiro,[11] Frank secured aGuggenheim Fellowship from theJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation[17] in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph all strata of its society. Cities he visited includedDetroit andDearborn, Michigan;Savannah, Georgia;Miami Beach andSt. Petersburg, Florida;New Orleans, Louisiana;Houston, Texas;Los Angeles, California;Reno, Nevada;Salt Lake City, Utah;Butte, Montana; andChicago, Illinois.[18] He took his family along with him for part of his series ofroad trips over the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 shots. 83 of these were selected by him for publication inThe 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 theSouth, 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 metBeat writerJack Kerouac "at a New York party where poets and Beatniks were," and showed him the photographs from his travels.[19] However, according toJoyce 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 ofThe Americans. Frank also became lifelong friends withAllen 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 byRobert Delpire in Paris, as part of itsEncyclopédie Essentielle series, with texts bySimone de Beauvoir,Erskine Caldwell,William Faulkner,Henry Miller andJohn Steinbeck that Delpire positioned opposite Frank's photographs.[23] It was finally published in 1959 in the United States, without the texts, byGrove 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 andart history, and is the work with which Frank is most clearly identified. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing inThe Guardian in 2014, said "it is impossible to imagine photography's recent past and overwhelmingly confusing present without his lingeringly pervasive presence." and thatThe 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, entitledRobert Frank: Photographer, at theArt Institute of Chicago. He also showed at theMuseum of Modern Art in New York in 1962.[24]
The French JournalLes 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 ofThe Americans, a new edition was released worldwide on May 30, 2008.[25] For this new edition fromSteidl, 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 ofThe Americans, titledLooking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, was displayed in 2009 at theNational Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and at theMetropolitan 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 onThe 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 titledLooking 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 theLooking In exhibition to choose their favorite image fromThe Americans and explain their choice, resulting in the book,By the Glow of the Jukebox: The Americans List.[30]
By the timeThe Americans was published in the United States in 1959, Frank had moved away from photography to concentrate on filmmaking. Among his films was the 1959Pull My Daisy, which was written and narrated by Kerouac and starred Ginsberg,Gregory Corso and others from the Beat circle. The Beats emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised.[19]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 theVillage 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 inPop artistGeorge Segal's basement while filmingThe 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 aroundNew Brunswick, but Frank ended up shooting for six months.
Frank's 1972 documentary of theRolling Stones,Cocksucker Blues, is arguably his best known film. The film shows the Stones on tour, engaging in heavy drug use andgroup 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 thecopyright. 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' albumExile on Main St..[33]
Other films by Frank includeMe and My Brother,Keep Busy, andCandy Mountain (the last was co-directed withRudy Wurlitzer).[34][35]
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 andcollages, 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 ofThe Americans. As some critics have pointed out, this is perhaps because Frank began playing with constructed images more than a decade afterRobert Rauschenberg introduced his silkscreen composites—in contrast toThe 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 sculptorJune Leaf, and in 1971, moved to the community ofMabou inCape 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 withschizophrenia. 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 hisBleecker 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 1984Democratic National Convention, and directingmusic videos for artists such asNew Order ("Run"), andPatti Smith ("Summer Cannibals"). Frank produced both films and still images, and helped organize several retrospectives of his art. His work has been represented byPace/MacGill Gallery in New York since 1984.[38] In 1994, theNational Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. presented the most comprehensive retrospective of Frank's work to date, entitledMoving Out.[39]
Frank died on September 9, 2019, at his home in Nova Scotia.[40][41]
| Year | Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1959 | Pull My Daisy | withAlfred Leslie. Adapted from aJack Kerouac play, starringAllen 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 theRolling Stones' 1972 tour.[32] |
| 1975 | Keep Busy | withRudy Wurlitzer.[52][53] |
| 1980 | Life Dances On | [54][55] |
| 1981 | Energy and How to Get It | withRudy Wurlitzer.[56] |
| 1983 | This Song For Jack | [57] |
| 1985 | Home Improvements | [58] |
| 1988 | Candy Mountain | withRudy 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] |
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