{"id":40422,"date":"2019-09-25T23:45:46","date_gmt":"2019-09-26T03:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=40422"},"modified":"2025-12-09T13:20:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T18:20:19","slug":"robert-frank-1924-2019-a-farewell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2019\/09\/25\/robert-frank-1924-2019-a-farewell\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Frank (1924-2019): A Farewell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ADColeman[The death of Robert Frank at the age of 94<\/a> in a Nova Scotia hospital on September 9, 2019 will mark the end of an era for many, myself included. In some ways his work bookends my work as a photography critic, at least up to this point.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I began publishing my column “Latent Image” in the <\/em>Village Voice in June 1968, Frank’s germinal 1959 book, <\/em>The Americans, had gone out of print. Yet its disturbing, disruptive effect had already begun to manifest itself in the contemporary photographic work that I began writing about a decade later. I would end up reviewing the second U.S. edition of<\/em> The Americans, published by Aperture in 1970. <\/em><\/p>\n

I got to meet Frank and his wife, the painter and sculptor June Leaf, several times \u2014 as when he attended the opening of a retrospective exhibition of the work of Michael Martone that I curated for the gallery of the Department of Photography, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, in 1986. Frank and I shared a deep respect for this unjustly neglected photographer. I also ended up having a bit part in one of Frank’s lesser films, “Last Supper”<\/a> (1992).<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Robert

Robert Frank and June Leaf, Mabou, Nova Scotia, ca. 1994. Photo \u00a9 2019 by Clark Winter<\/p><\/div>\n

I had the curious fortune of learning of Frank’s passing from a tearful close friend of his into whose Manhattan apartment I walked that morning expecting to pursue a different professional matter, and to find myself on the phone, a few hours later, with another of his close friends, also sobbing. For a man so inward, and so determinedly reclusive, Robert Frank was much loved \u2014 certainly by those who knew him well, but also by many who, like me, knew him only in passing, and thousands more who know only his work and his example.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I left my friend’s apartment that afternoon I walked past the Astor Place building where Frank and Leaf lived and worked when in New York. People were milling around outside, and flowers and other tributes were already piling up.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Sarah

Sarah Greenough and Phillip Brookman, Robert Frank: Moving Out (1995), cover<\/p><\/div>\n

While Frank became a reference point for me in my early years as a photo critic, as he did for so many others, and gradually turned into a \u2014 perhaps<\/em> the \u2014<\/em> central figure in my thinking about 20th-century photography, for one reason or another I would not write at length about him until the occasion arose with his 1995 touring exhibition “Moving Out.”<\/em><\/p>\n

The following review thereof, under the headline<\/em> “Robert Frank, a Retrospective: The Reluctant Reference Point,” appeared in my column at the <\/em>New York Observer, December 4, 1995. <\/em>\u2014 A.D.C.]<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

For myself, and for many others, no living photographer occupies a position of greater importance than Robert Frank, no single work resonates more profoundly than The Americans<\/em>. By choice, this Swiss-born expatriate has produced no extended, unified body of strictly photographic work since The Americans<\/em>, his first published book, appeared in 1959. Yet, despite a third of a century’s work in film and twenty-five years’ production of photographic objects, that slim volume, which represented and provoked one of the medium’s great paradigm shifts, remains the single creative act for which he’s most widely and immediately recognized.<\/p>\n

\"Robert

Robert Frank, “The Americans,” first U.S. edition, 1959.<\/p><\/div>\n

Hence the impossibility of visualizing the photography of the past forty years with Robert Frank absent from it parallels the difficulty of imagining Mr. Frank’s life work with his early achievements in still photography extracted therefrom. The fine retrospective survey “Robert Frank: Moving Out” currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art misses a bet by not including copies of the first French (Delpire) and U.S. (Grove Press) editions of that book \u2014 diminutive artifacts that revised assumptions about photography no less drastically than “Waiting for Godot” rewrote the ground rules for theater. However, as this show makes clear, The Americans<\/em> became an anomaly within Mr. Frank’s oeuvre as his creative life evolved.<\/p>\n

\"Robert

Robert Frank, The Lines of My Hand (cover), 1978<\/p><\/div>\n

Aside from a 1972 volume, The Lines of My Hand<\/em>, which I would describe as a contextualizing commentary on that earlier project, he would never again concentrate on the small-camera black & white seeing for which he’d manifested such genius, nor redact still images into extended sequences with such virtuoso skill, nor address the social anomie of this or any other culture with such direct, penetrating insight. Instead, he headed down a more introspective, autobiographical path, especially in his subsequent photographic activity, while devoting his energies to media that proved far less tractable \u2014 forms in which his successes have been less evident and less frequent, his performance more inconsistent, his influence (aside from his first film, Pull My Daisy<\/em>, made with Alfred Leslie) less unavoidable.<\/p>\n

Indeed, one subtext of this show, at least in my reading of it, is the extent to which that first book, as a succes d’estime<\/em>, altered Mr. Frank \u2014 or, perhaps more precisely, redefined the context in which he lived and worked \u2014 in ways not at all to his liking. That book’s acuteness as sociopolitical critique, its seminal insights into book form and the sequencing of photographs, its innovations in image structure and its display of virtuoso skills in camera handling made the reclusive photographer into a reference point and even something of a celebrity on numerous levels simultaneously.<\/p>\n

\"Robert

Robert Frank, Mabou, Nova Scotia, ca. 1994. Photo \u00a9 2019 by Clark Winter<\/p><\/div>\n

To say that he did not relish that role in any venue would understate the case; the energy he’s found it necessary to expend in resisting those unexpected consequences has been considerable. As Neil Young sings, “It don’t mean that much to me to mean that much to you.” Mr. Frank has worked very hard to fall back into the pack and persuade everyone, himself included, that his germinal book was really a fluke \u2014 or, in any event, that nothing else like it should be expected of him.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Somewhere, I once read that among Japanese woodblock artists it was a custom to find and develop a style, bring it to a peak of perfection \u2014 and then abandon both the style and the name one had used while working within it, starting over fresh, at the bottom, with no residual fame, nothing to live up to. It’s no coincidence that the Japanese have been among Mr. Frank’s first and greatest fans; there are kinships between the swift brushstrokes of sumi-e<\/em> painting and the gestural-drawing quality of small-camera photography at its best, exemplified by Mr. Frank’s work. Had he lived in a culture in which changing one’s name was permissible, I think he might have done so; instead, after The Americans<\/em>, he simply stepped off the stage of classic still photography, never to return.<\/p>\n

\"Robert

Robert Frank, “Sick of Goodby\u2019s,” 1978 (from The Lines of My Hand)<\/p><\/div>\n

Yet he cannot get rid of his place in the medium’s history, nor of its place in his life on all levels. This exhibition includes a retrospective of Mr. Frank’s films and videos (for the record, I have a small speaking role in one of these, “Last Supper.”) Among the most notable, and most painful, of these works is “Conversations In Vermont,” in which Mr. Frank and his children speak of the past, using his photographs as memory triggers.<\/p>\n

In addition to his inwardness, Mr. Frank makes it clear from his work that he’s haunted by many things, including his own photographs. “Sick of Goodby’s,” reads a photographed scrawl on a mirror from which one of his collages takes its title, and he has said his share of those \u2014 most painfully, no doubt, to his daughter Andrea, killed in a plane crash, and his emotionally disturbed son Pablo, dead by his own hand.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

All of that personal history is embedded within his films, photographs, and mixed-media works. I find the assemblages uneven in quality, but never uninteresting, and the best of them have a remarkable potency. In one of the most poignant works in this show, an untitled assemblage from 1989, two clusters of photographs coexist. The bottom half consists of a collage of some 20 fading thermal-transfer prints, in one of which the words “Haunted to death” can be clearly read. Above them, bound in copper wire and literally nailed to the backing board, there’s a thick stack of silver-gelatin prints, presumably all the photographer’s own images. On top is an image of his made in Spain, in 1950, at a bullfight<\/a>. In the foreground stands a bull, seen from behind and above, a matador’s sword plunged deep into his back. It sticks out at an angle \u2014 a bungled thrust, perhaps not even fatal. Yet he’s dead already. Beyond him, slightly out of focus, we see bullfighters’ legs and hands, gestures suggesting shoptalk, the business of the kill. In this context, it feels like a self-portrait, with the bull standing in for the photographer. In the collage underneath, Mr. Frank looks out at you, as you look through his eyes at the bull, and at him.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Another difference between The Americans<\/em> and everything that came after is the shift it represents from clarity and precision to messiness. The photographer took a full year to redact that work, winnowing 83 images out of approximately 20,000, organizing them into a structure so complex and tight that even the reversing of two images shifts the meaning. The photographs in The Americans<\/em> lay out the future of this country with the inexorability of a fortune-teller dealing out the Tarot. There’s not a replaceable picture in the entire statement, not a note out of place, nary a slip in the rhythm. This is as close to perfect as anyone in photography had come in constructing a bookwork \u2014 more so, even, than Walker Evans’s American Photographs<\/em>, which had influenced it considerably.<\/p>\n

\"Robert

Robert Frank contemplating Da Vinci portrait, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 24, 2009. Photo \u00a9 2019 by Clark Winter<\/p><\/div>\n

Something about that, I think, bothered Mr. Frank. From the evidence of everything since, he’s drawn to open forms, loose ends, a sense of the homemade and handmade, the occasional slipped stitch, a story that goes on a bit too long, a stewpot with food baked onto its sides, typescript instead of print. Looking at the Whitney’s concurrent show, “Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-65,” one can see his obvious kinship with Beat attitudes, part of which was a rebellion against the paralyzing neatness of U.S. culture. Mr. Frank must have empathized particularly with that tendency, coming from Switzerland, an even more hidebound country. (My favorite Swiss joke: Why don’t the Swiss steal? Because it’s forbidden.)<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

If Mr. Frank could not escape our awareness of him as the maker of The Americans<\/em>, he certainly has refused to rest on that laurel, and doggedly resisted our defining him by it. He’s made any attempt to place him on a pedestal or elevate him to a pantheon as difficult as any major artist I know of, past or present. He has found ways of making his discomfort with his stature ours, using our reverence for The Americans<\/em> and our respect for him against us not sneeringly but subversively, demanding that we come to terms with him, and ourselves, always in the present, in the now.<\/p>\n

In that intransigence he joins Jack Kerouac (who wrote the introduction for the U.S. edition of The Americans<\/em>) and the other Beat writers and artists who formed his cohort \u2014 and the visionaries, jazz musicians and Zen philosophers from whom they drew inspiration \u2014 in refusing to distinguish between art-making and living, and insisting on approaching both as process rather than product. Surely he has kept the faith.<\/p>\n

\"Robert

Robert Frank, Mabou, Nova Scotia, 2018. Photo \u00a9 2018 by Clark Winter<\/p><\/div>\n

Organized by Sarah Greenough of the National Gallery of Art and Philip Brookman of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, this show is drawn in large part from a major collection of Mr. Frank’s work now in the holdings of the National Gallery, where the retrospective made its debut a year ago. Twenty-three films and videotapes will be screened during its stay at the Whitney. This will enable the New York audience to start coming to terms with the totality of the output of this 71-year-old artist, perhaps at long last putting his early achievement in context \u2014 and in perspective.<\/p>\n

\"Robert

Robert Frank at Michael Martone retrospective, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, 1986. Photographer unknown.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

This post sponsored by a donation from photographer Bill Krumholz<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Special offer:<\/strong> If you want me to either continue pursuing a particular subject or give you a break and (for one post) write on a topic \u2014 my choice \u2014 other than the current main story, make a donation of $50 via the PayPal widget below<\/strong>, indicating your preference in a note accompanying your donation. I’ll credit you as that new post’s sponsor, and link to a website of your choosing.<\/p>\n

\"Liu<\/a>Include\u00a0 a note with your snail-mail address (or email it to me separately<\/a>) <\/em>and I’ll include three (3!) copies of The Silent Strength of Liu Xia<\/em>, the catalog of the 2012-13 touring exhibition of photos<\/a> by the dissident Chinese photographer, artist, and poet, who, after eight years of extralegal house arrest in Beijing, finally got released and expatriated to Germany in 2018. The only publication of her photographic work, it includes all 26 images in the exhibition, plus another 14 from the same series, along with essays by Guy Sorman, Andrew Nathan, and Cui Weiping, professor at the Beijing Film Academy. Keep one for yourself, share the others with friends.<\/p>\n

[donateplus]<\/p>\n

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If Mr. Frank could not escape our awareness of him as the maker of The Americans, he certainly has refused to rest on that laurel, and doggedly resisted our defining him by it. He’s made any attempt to place him on a pedestal or elevate him to a pantheon as difficult as any major artist I know of, past or present. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[788,9,1025],"tags":[701,1843,1844,1842,1780,1841,1838,1737],"class_list":["post-40422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analog-photography-2","category-exhibition-reviews","category-from-the-archives","tag-jack-kerouac","tag-june-leaf","tag-michael-martone","tag-philip-brookman","tag-robert-frank","tag-sarah-greenough","tag-the-americans","tag-walker-evans","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40422"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47653,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40422\/revisions\/47653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}