Robert Frank, one of the 20th century’s titans of photography, died at the age of 94, on September 9 in Inverness, Nova Scotia. The news was confirmed by Peter MacGill, whose Pace-MacGill Gallery in Manhattan represented Frank since 1983.
Frank was born in Zürich, Switzerland in 1924, where he initially trained as a studio photographer. However, soon feeling the limitations of the Swiss professional sphere, he made for Paris—where he produced the first of many handmade albums, including his portfolio titled 40 Fotos (1946)—before heading on to New York, via a boat that sailed from Antwerp, in 1947. There, he was employed by Harper’s Bazaar, under the tenure of renowned art director Alexey Brodovitch; and freelanced for a variety of publications, including Vogue, Life and Fortune.
Commercial jobs didn’t really interest him, though, he was too restless for their glossy stasis. He soon took off on a series of travels across South America, documenting what he saw along the way. By 1950, his work had already impressed curator and then director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Edward Steichen, such that he included Frank in his exhibition of 51 American Photographers at the museum.
Come the mid-1950s Frank was on the move again: now in the process of creating what would become his best known and loved publication. With the support of the Guggenheim Foundation, which provided grants to artists, he embarked on a number of road trips criss-crossing huge swathes of America. Covering 10,000 miles and shooting some 28,000 or so photographs during his two years of travel, Frank endeavoured to capture America as he felt it really was: a place simmering with tension and change. A place where poverty and isolation was rife, racism stark, and the tug between old and new ever present.
This staggering number of images was subsequently condensed down to just 83, the final selection collated together into Frank’s book The Americans. First published in France (as Les Américains) in 1958, the US edition came out the following year, complete with an introduction by Beat poet and author Jack Kerouac. Effusive in his praise, Kerouac claimed that Frank had “with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow, photographed scenes that have never been seen on film.”
By turns beautiful, eerie, solemn and confrontational, the scenes captured by Frank deliberately contradicted the contemporary photo-journalistic tone in the US at the time, which maintained a focus on post-war growth and prised perfect suburban homes and candid shots of Hollywood stars. Frank’s grainy Leica 35mm black-and-white photos, by contrast, were rather ragged around the edges: the framing suggestive of a roving eye, never quite settling as it took in funerals, drive-ins, highways, bathrooms, churches, segregated trolleys and snatched glimpses through windows into unknown lives. Full of motorcyclists and cowboys, gesticulating politicians and girls in white dresses, Frank aimed, ambitiously, to capture American society in its complex and often contradictory totality.
It worked. Despite an initially frosty critical response, Frank’s reputation as a chronicler of the underrepresented margins of society grew, slowly but surely. While The Americans only sold a mere 600 copies of its first edition, today, it’s regularly deemed to be among the most important, influential and ground-breaking photographic works of the mid-20th century, influencing everyone from Ed Ruscha to Lou Reed.
Frank’s restlessness, however, wasn’t just geographic. After The Americans, he switched largely to moving image, making films including Pull My Daisy in 1959 (written and narrated by Jack Kerouac) and, infamously, Cocksucker Blues: a 1972 documentary focused on the behind-the-scenes exploits of The Rolling Stones on tour. Unsparing in its depictions of sex and drug taking, the Stones eventually had to sue to stop it being released. Mick Jagger apparently told him: “It’s a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America, we’ll never be allowed in the country again.”
Photography remained in the background of Frank’s artistic career throughout. He returned to his cameras after the tragic death of his daughter Andrea, in a plane crash in Guatemala in 1974, at the age of just 20 (his son Pablo also sadly died, by suicide in 1994). In the aftermath of his grief, Frank produced fragmentary work comprised of polaroids, postcards and scratched negatives, signalling a shift that the artist described as being from “about what I saw, to what I felt.”
Now, with hindsight, Frank’s vast and varied career reflects a sea-change in the relationship between camera and reality, existing in the same observant realm as other photographers including Vivian Maier and Diane Arbus. His collected works are indicative of a man who admired the dimly lit loneliness of Edward Hopper, dismissing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s emphasis on neat composition; and who wished, above all, to continue seeking (and relentlessly capturing) “some moment [he] couldn’t explain”.
