Thinking About Robert Frank

Hi everyone - Hard to believe, but we are fast approaching the 50

year mark for Robert Franks tour of the US which resulted in "The

Americans".

Until recently, I was not familar with Franks work. Sure I had seen

some of his well known pictures like the tuba player in Chicago, but

I never knew whose picture it was. In school we discussed him briefly.

So last week I checked out a couple books including The Americans.

I'd like to read your comments on Frank. Do you think The Americans

is as controversial today as it was when it was published in the

late '50's? Why or why not? Do you agree with some of the critics who

blasted Franks grainy, somewhat underexposed style? Do you think this

was simply a matter of shooting on the fly with a fast film for extra

exposure capabilities, or was Franks intention to give this texture

to many pictures? Do you think such a series of photos could be made

today? When one thinks of "American" type photos, they may think of

recent books like "A Day in the Life of America" or "24/7" both of

which show bright, colorful, optimistic pictures of America. Would a

book like Franks The Americans be embraced today. Mind you that in

the '50's life wasn't like the TV shows from that era portray. Franks

photo of the streetcar with the blacks at the back of the bus and the

white people in front speaks for itself.

Do you think that Frank, being of Swiss decent, portrayed America as

a citizen or non-citizen? Apparently, some say if he were born and

rasied in the US, he would have taken different pictures. If this is

true, then what was he trying to say with the ones he did take? Was

it his intention to shock or offend (as he seemed to have to many

people)? Do these pictures have any significance on our culture

today? Can we look at his pictures and see how our society has

progressed (or regressed) from that time?

Thanks for your comments.

Regards,

Marc

Way too many questions. However, I think it's interesting to compare <i>The Americans</i> with William Klein's <i>New York.</i> They were shot within a few years of each other, but Klein's work is intensely gritty and almost paralyzing in its directness, a slap in the face with America, and in comparison Frank, seems much more genteel. Frank's work is much more lyrical however, giving a poetic view of the depressing state of the country, with Klein basically giving everyone the finger and saying "It sucks."

The use of iconographic motifs (jukeboxes, barber shops and so on) was what I found interesting.

As I learned by analyzing poetry, a little bit of background info on the artist can give you the "a-ha!" moment. If you know the state of the country in the 1950's and where Frank came from, you'll understand why he would take most of the pictures he took, or at least why he would choose the ones he did and what statement he made with them.

 

The one that ashames me most as an American is the one from the southwest of three posters. A beautiful untainted landscape, followed by a heavily manipulated version, Hoover Dam, which has some beauty in itself, and finally, an atomic bomb. What more can you say about that?

While Frank's documentary/street work is pretty terrific, these images make up the earlier third of his career. I am significantly more interested in Frank's more recent images - the work he did (and still does) with large format (polaroid P/N & others) negatives, words and kinofilm (movies, whatever.) These images were produced partially in reaction to the deaths of his children and many were done in Mabou, Nova Scotia. This journaling, rather than journalistic, aspect of his photography is really what I react to the most strongly, and perhaps in this way, he is most American - the whole idea that Lou Reed desribed in an interview I heard (and will now ruin with paraphrasing) about how his generation just wanted to write the Great American Novel only no one he knew was doing this with books. His photographic "tryptic" titled "4AM Make Love to Me" remains one of my favorite photographs. Or "No More Words." The absolute essence of moments. I like the early work, but the images that are most truly Frank to me are the later things - Hold Still Keep Going or Flamingo for example if you are looking for books and examples.

I'm glad someone mentioned "hold still, keep moving", a book I own (along with the americans, of course), and one I've puzzled over. It's difficult to connect with many images in this book, for me. Juxtaposing words - typed, scrawled on negs, photographed, is a recurrent theme that often (not always) escapes me. Many other images are eminently approachable. But in the aggregate, I suspect I'm not getting all that's to be had from this book. I've gone through it a number of times, gaining a little each time. It's a book I'd eagerly attend a lecture on, or a class.

 

To Marc's question "would a book like The Americans be embraced today", since it is still in print and actively being sold, and probably one of the most popular photography books ever made, the answer is a definite "yes".

I don't believe that Franks' work was rejected by the public (who had experienced first hand the Depression and the photographic record of that tragic time by Evans, Lange, etc.). The famous streetcar photograph actually fails to show anything about segregation; it is one of those pictures where the viewer will see what he is looking for, not what is actually there. It could be taken today.

I don't believe that Frank's intentions were to shock and offend anyone, his pictures

don't have that confrontational feeling. Perhaps this is a view only afforded in

hindsight, but I feel that Frank looked for his own truths. I don't think that he had

the intentions of "blowing the lid" off of America. What makes these photographs so

timeless is the personal vision of their creator.

 

Tim

I once heard Frank express the desire to have a camera in his head. I think part of this desire comes from the fascination with the kinoscopic way that we experience reality - consciousness as a series of snapshots (ala research by Francis Crick et al as explained in the New York Review of Books a couple months ago) - and from a sense of artistic frustration at not being able to fully convey that experience in all its synesthetic power to another person. His writing on the negatives is in one way an expression of a failure to communicate pictorially what it is he is trying to communicate. But on the other hand, what he is trying to communicate is much larger than merely the image itself, and thus the words that find their way into the image. I say "find their way" as I imagine at least that the construction of these word photos relies heavily on a sort of gestalt or gut-level process of negotiating the space between what Frank wants to communicate and the what the limited tools of images & words allow him to communicate. He is really operating at the central point between images, poetry and narrative. I think too, that the book format is difficult. Seeing them in person is much better as it has a more spiritual (as in holy book) sort of overtone - without being too cliche. Why a trip to Winterthur Fotomuseum in Switzerland or the Creative Photography in Tucson might be a good idea.