Robert Frank (b. 1924, d. 2019) is best known for his innovations in documentary photography. Born in Switzerland into a Jewish family fleeing Nazi persecution, Frank traveled to New York City when he was 23, but returned to Switzerland only two years later. Alienated by commercial photography work at Harper's Bazaar, his experience in New York was nonetheless formative for his art practice, as it sharpened his identity as a forever outsider.
One of his most significant interventions in American photography was to challenge the prevailing grammar of postwar photographic composition. The imagery of 1950s America should be familiar to most: Orderly and clear, the images of everyday working heroes, striving families, and social leisure proffered an ideal America steeped in prosperity and progress. Frank's seminal book The Americans (1958) challenges these motifs by focusing on the "perennial losers" of America with a characteristic imprecision that expresses precisely the predicaments they faced. Frank spent three years traveling the country capturing Black Americans in the Jim Crow south, sex workers in New York City, and low-wage workers in San Francisco in a reflective and expressive style that countered the myth of an American equality for all.
Frank's work anticipated the counterculture of the 1960s, and it brought him into contact with the other artists that now exemplify the movement. Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to The Americans, and Allen Ginsberg features in one of Frank's first films, which was based on a Kerouac play. Frank began to explore the possibilities of film during this time, and was hired by the Rolling Stones to document the tour for the album Exile on Main St. The film, Cocksucker Blues, which is officially unreleased, was graphic in its depictions of drug use and group sex. Famously, it was banned from screening unless Frank himself was physically present, the result of a legal dispute between him and the band.
While his photographic work made his name, Frank's forays into moving pictures are lesser known. A reflection on a compilation of his early and mid-career film work, Frank Films is one of the last books he published during his lifetime. Frank insisted that the whole of the imagery be taken from film stills, rather than actual photographs. Such a choice might remind readers of the famous line by Jean Luc-Godard: "Film is truth twenty-four times a second, and every cut is a lie." Film itself is nothing more than a series of still photographs moving at a given rate of time, producing the illusion of time and space. Frank's own photographic work has been lauded for its cinematic quality, its powerful moods evocative of the same phenomenon. Frank Films finds the photographer once again helping us see how his eyes see askew, identifying the half-second glimpses of real life emerging.
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