Роберт Франк: Фотограф и Американец

Swiss American photographer (1924–2019)

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.

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. 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. 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.

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, 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. 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. 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." 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.

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. Other films by Frank include Me and My Brother, Keep Busy, and Candy Mountain (the last was co directed with Rudy Wurlitzer). Frank and Mary separated in 1969. 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.

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.

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

1955: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial 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.