Robert Frank

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." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.
Background and early photography career
Frank was born in Zürich, Switzerland, the son of Rosa (Zucker) and Hermann Frank. His family was Jewish. Robert states in Gerald Fox's 2004 documentary Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank that his mother, Rosa (other sources state 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. 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. In 1953, he returned to New York and continued to work as a freelance photojournalist for magazines including McCall's, 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.
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. 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.
The Americans
Inspired by fellow Swiss Jakob Tuggener's 1943 filmic book Fabrik, Bill Brandt's The English at Home (1936), and Walker Evans's American Photographs (1938), and on the recommendation of Evans (a previous recipient), Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Leiberman, Edward Steichen, and Meyer Schapiro, Frank secured a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph all strata of its society. Cities he visited included Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan; Savannah, Georgia; Miami Beach and St. Petersburg, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Reno, Nevada; Salt Lake City, Utah; Butte, Montana; and Chicago, Illinois. 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.
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." 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.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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."
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.
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. 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.
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. The second section of the four-section, 2009, SFMOMA 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, 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.
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 Pull 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. 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 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." 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. Frank's photography also appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stones' album Exile on Main St..
Other films by Frank include Me and My Brother, Keep Busy, and Candy Mountain (the last was co-directed with Rudy Wurlitzer).
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.
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, 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.
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. 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.
Frank died on September 9, 2019, at his home in Nova Scotia.
Publications
Publications by Frank
Les Américains The Americans
Paris: Delpire, 1958. French. Includes text in French by Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck about American political and social history, selected by Alain Bosquet. Part of the Encyclopédie Essentielle series.
New York: Grove Press, 1959. Introduction by Jack Kerouac.
New York: Aperture; Museum of Modern Art, 1969. Revised and enlarged edition. With an introduction by Jack Kerouac, a brief introduction by Frank, and a survey of Frank's films, each represented by a page of film frame stills.
Göttingen: Steidl, 2008. . Most photographs are uncropped compared with cropped versions in previous editions, and two photographs are replaced with those of the same subject but from an alternate perspective.
The Lines of my Hand.
Tokyo: Yugensha. Deluxe, slipcased edition. Edition of 1000 copies, 500 featured the slipcase photograph of "New York City, 1948", 500 featured the slipcase photograph of "Platte River, Tennessee".
New York: Lustrum Press, 1972. Paperback.
New York: Pantheon. .
Flower is… Yugensha, 1987. Edition of 1000 copies, 500 featured "Champs-Élysées, 1950 [Fleurs]" tipped onto the front cover, 500 featured "Metro Stalingrad" tipped onto the front cover.
Flamingo. Göteborg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center, 1997. . Catalogue for Hasselblad Award exhibition, Hasselblad Center, Goteborg, Sweden.
London/Wales. Published in collaboration with the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., for an exhibition held May 10 – July 14, 2003.
Zurich; New York: Scalo, 2003. .
Göttingen: Steidl, 2007. .
Come Again. Göttingen: Steidl, 2006. . According to the back cover, "Photos have been taken within the context of the photographical project 'Beirut, city centre, 1991', Éditions de Cyprès, Paris."
Paris. Göttingen: Steidl, 2006. .
Peru. Göttingen: Steidl, 2006. .
Zero Mostel Reads a Book. Göttingen: Steidl, 2006. .
Tal Uf Tal Ab. Göttingen: Steidl, 2010. . The first of the "Visual Diaries" combining photos from Frank's early career with the more private pictures he made in the latter part of his life. Other titles in the series are marked with a *
Pangnirtung. Göttingen: Steidl, 2011. .
Pull My Daisy. Göttingen: Steidl, 2011. . A transcript of Kerouac's narration from the film Pull My Daisy (1959) with film stills and an introduction by Jerry Tallmer.
Ferne Nähe: Hommage für Robert Walser Distant Closeness: A Tribute to Robert Walser. Bern: Robert Walser-Zentrum, 2012. .
You Would. Göttingen: Steidl, 2012. . *
Park/Sleep. Göttingen: Steidl, 2013. . *
Partida. Göttingen: Steidl, 2014. . *
What We Have Seen. Göttingen: Steidl, 2016. . *
Leon of Juda. Göttingen: Steidl, 2017. . *
Good Days Quiet. Göttingen: Steidl, 2019. .
Critical studies, reviews and biographies
Les Cahiers de la photographie 11/12 and Special 3, “Robert Frank, la photographie, enfin,” 4th quarter, 1983; essays by Walker Evans, Gilles Mora, Alain Bergala, and others.
Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; Göttingen: Steidl, 2009. . By Sarah Greenough. With essays by Stuart Alexander, Phillip Brookman, Michel Frizot, Martin Gasser, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Lucy Sante and Anne Wilkes Tucker. Published to accompany an exhibition organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
By the Glow of the Juke Box: The Americans List. New York: Red Hook, 2012. Edited by Jason Eskenazi, with contributions from 276 photographers
Reviews The Americans.
Films
Don't Blink – Robert Frank (2015). Documentary directed by Laura Israel.
Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank (2004). Documentary directed by Gerald Fox
Filmography
Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions (selected)
1961: Robert Frank: The Americans, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
1976: Robert Frank, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich
1979: Robert Frank: Photographer/Filmmaker, Works 1945–1979, Long Beach Museum of Art.
1985: Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
1989: The Americans, Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles
1997: Flamingo, Hasselblad Award exhibition, Hasselblad Center, Goteborg, Sweden
2003: Robert Frank: London/Wales, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
2004: Storylines, Tate Modern Museum, London
2005: Storylines, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur
2008: Robert Frank. Paris, Museum Folkwang, Essen
2009: Looking In: The Americans, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
2009: Robert Frank. Die Filme, C/O Berlin, Berlin
2010: The Unseen Eye: Photography from the collection of W.M. Hunt (group exhibition), Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala
2012: Robert Frank. From the collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow
2014: Robert Frank In America, Cantor Art Center at Stanford University, Stanford
2014: Robert Frank. Books and Films. 1947–2014, Akademie der Bildenden Künste München; anschließend 2015 Museum Folkwang, Essen
2016: Robert Frank: Books and Films, 1947–2016, HALLE 14 – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig
2016: Robert Frank: Books and Films. 1947–2016, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg
2016: Robert Frank: Books and Films. 1947–2016, Kunsthalle Ziegelhütte, Appenzell
2017: Robert Frank: Photos, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Group exhibitions (selected)
1955: The Family of Man, Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 24 – May 8 (Frank represented with 5 works)
1962: Photographs by Harry Callahan and Robert Frank, Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 30 – April 1
2004: Cruel and Tender. Fotografie und das Wirkliche, Museum Ludwig, Köln
2004: Cold Play. Set 1 aus der Sammlung des Fotomuseums Winterthur, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur
2005: I Wanna Be Loved By You, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn
2006: American Beauty, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
2006: Some tribes, Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich
2008: Street Art, Street Life: From the 1950s to Now, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York
2010: Staff Picks 2010, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
2010: Humanos. Acciones, Historia Y Fotografía, Centro de Arte Alcobendas (CAA), Madrid
Awards
1955: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
1996: Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography from the Hasselblad Foundation.
2002: Edward MacDowell Medal, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH.
2015: Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax, Canada.
References
Sources
Philip Gefter, Snapshots From The American Road, The New York Times, December 14, 2008.
Further reading
Alexander, Stuart. – Robert Frank: A Bibliography, Filmography, and Exhibition Chronology, 1946–1985 (Center for Creative Photography, 1986). OCLC 16798695
Gefter, Philip. – Photography After Frank (Aperture, 2009).
Green, Jonathan. – American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present (Abrams, 1984). Chapter 5, "The Americans: Politics and Alienation."
Janis, Eugenia Parry and Wendy MacNeil, eds. – Photography Within the Humanities (Addison House, 1977). "Robert Frank" (transcript of a talk and interview conducted at Wellesley College on April 14, 1975), pp. 52–65.
Leo, Vince. – "Robert Frank: From Compromise to Collaboration." Parkett, 1994, Issue 42, pp. 8–23.
Papageorge, Tod. – "Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence" (Yale University Art Gallery, 1981).
Penman, Ian. – Robert Frank: Storylines (Steidl, 2004).
Sandeen, Eric. – Picturing An Exhibition (University of New Mexico Press, 1995). Chapter 5, "Edward Steichen, Robert Frank, and American Modernism."
Tucker, Anne and Philip Brookman, eds. – Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1986).
Bibliographies
Frank Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
External links
VR tour of "Robert Frank" at Hamiltons Gallery, London
Robert Frank's Masterpiece: "The Americans" at 50
Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans", National Gallery of Art, 2008
Elson Lecture 2009: Robert Frank, National Gallery of Art
Robert Frank Collection Guide, National Gallery of Art, 2014 (with "more than 430 images")
'Walker Evans and Robert Frank: an Essay on Influence' by Tod Papageorge
Nericcio, William Anthony. – Cinematography, Photography, and Literature: Robert Frank's Aesthetic Triptych (MOPA, San Diego, 2000). (An online essay on Pull My Daisy with illustrations and film-clip.)
'Robert Frank: Dissecting The American Image' by Jno Cook
Illustrated book review of The Americans
Robert Frank: The Photographer Who Captured America’s Dark Side, by Lucas Reilly, January 1, 2015, Mental Floss
American film directors
1924 births
2019 deaths
Street photographers
Social documentary photographers
American expatriates in Canada
Swiss emigrants to the United States
American people of Swiss-Jewish descent
Swiss Jews
Swiss photographers
People from Inverness County, Nova Scotia
People from New York (state)
20th-century American photographers
21st-century American photographers
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters