- Robert Frank
Infobox Artist
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name = Robert Frank
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birthdate = 1924
location =Zürich ,Switzerland
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field =Photography ,Film making
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awards =Robert Frank (born
November 9 ,1924 ), born inZürich ,Switzerland , is an important figure in Americanphotography andfilm . 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.Background and early photography career
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 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. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job inNew York City as afashion photographer for "Harper's Bazaar ". He soon left to travel inSouth America andEurope . He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot inPeru , and returned to the U.S. in 1950. That year was momentous for Frank, who after meetingEdward Steichen participated in the group show "51 American Photographers" at theMuseum 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 freelancephotojournalist for magazines including "McCall's ", "Vogue", and "Fortune"."The Americans"
With the aid of his major artistic influence, the photographer
Walker Evans , Frank secured a grant from theJohn 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 ofroad trip s 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 throughArkansas , Frank was arbitrarily [http://www.photopermit.org/articles/FrankReport.html 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 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 Frank's photographs a clear contrast to those of most contemporary Americanphotojournalist s, 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 andart 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 theArt 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 was released worldwide on May 30, 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., theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art , and at TheMetropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The new edition published by Steidl and the National Gallery of Art, Washington is available through the publisher,Steidl . [cite web|url=http://www.steidlville.com/books/695-The-Americans.html|title=Robert Frank: The Americans|publisher=Steidl]Films
By the time "The Americans" was published in the United States, however, 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 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 fromWalter K. Gutman .Isaac Babel 's story was transformed to center on a woman working on a chicken farm inNew Jersey . It was originally supposed to be filmed in six weeks in and aroundNew 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 andgroup 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 thecopyright . 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.
=Return to stillintroduced 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 inCape 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 withschizophrenia . 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 1984Democratic National Convention , and directingmusic video s for artists such asNew Order ("Run"), andPatti 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 inWashington, DC presented the most comprehensive retrospective of Frank's work to date, entitled "Moving Out". Frank was awarded the prestigiousHasselblad Award for photography in 1996. His 1997 award exhibition at the Hasselblad Center inGoteborg, Sweden was entitled "Flamingo", as was the accompanying published catalog.He is currently represented by the
Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York.Quotes
"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." Robert Frank, LIFE (26 November 1951), p. 21
"Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That's not quality, that's a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy - the tone range isn't right and things like that - but they're far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. It's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It's got to do with intention." (
Elliott Erwitt )References
Further reading
*Alexander, Stuart. – Robert Frank: A Bibliography, Filmography, and Exhibition Chronology 1946-1985. ISSN 0739-4845 LOC#: 86-071793
*Frank, Robert. – Robert Frank: Storylines (Turtleback) ISBN 3-86521-041-4
*Frank, Robert. – Twenty-four Photographs. In: Corina Caduff and Reto Sorg (Ed.): Nationalliteraturen heute – ein Fantom? Tradition und Imagination des Schweizerischen als Problem. Programmheft zur Internationalen Tagung vom 18. bis 21. Juni 2003 im Schauspielhaus Zürich. Mit Originalbeiträgen von Robert Frank und Michail Schischkin. Thun: Report 2003 [Switzerland] . ISBN 3-907591-30-5
*Green, Jonathan. – American Photography: A Critical History (Abrams). ISBN 0-8109-1814-5 Chapter 5, "The Americans: Politics and Alienation"
*Janis, Eugenia Parry and Wendy MacNeil, eds. – Photography Within the Humanities, Addison House Publishers, Danbury, NH, 1977. ISBN 0-89169-013-1, see pp. 52-65 for the transcript of a talk and interview with Robert Frank, conducted atWellesley College on 14 April 1975
*Leo, Vince. – Robert Frank: From Compromise to Collaboration. ("Parkett" Issue 42 1994 Pg 8-23)
*Nericcio, William Anthony. – Cinematography, Photography, and Literature: The Aesthetic Triptych of Robert Frank (MOPA, San Diego, 2000) [http://literature.sdsu.edu/textmex/RobertFrank/frankworking.html An online essay on "Pull My Daisy" with illustrations and film-clip]
*Papageorge, Tod. – Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence, New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Gallery, 1981. ISBN 0-89467-015-8
*Sandeen, Eric. – Picturing An Exhibition. ISBN 0-8263-1558-5, see chapter 5: "Edward Steichen, Robert Frank, and American Modernism"
*Tucker, Anne and Philip Brookman, eds. – New York to Nova Scotia ISBN 3-86521-013-9 Hardcover: ISBN 0821216236Bibliographies
* [http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/avantbib.html#frank Frank Bibliography] (via UC Berkeley)
External links
*
* [http://ericetheridge.com/wordblog/archives/2007/08/the_missing_cri.html/ Tod Papageorge on Walker Evans and Robert Frank]
* [http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/frank/ Tate Modern: Robert Frank]
* [http://shopping.icp.org/store/product.html?product_id=2873 "Frank Films"]
* [http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/english/textmex/RobertFrank/frankworking.html Essay]
* [http://jnocook.net/frank/frank.htm 'Robert Frank: Dissecting The American Image' by Jno Cook]
* [http://www.lensculture.com/frank.html Illustrated book review of The Americans]
*Imdb name|0291071
*worldcat id|id=lccn-nr2002-27404
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