Robert Frank – Photographer
Robert Frank, Photographer
November 9, 1924 – Still Shooting
“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
Robert Frank is an 87 year old iconic American Photographer. Frank was born in Zurich. He is an important figure in American photography and his most notable work is the 1958 photographic book titled The Americans.
Frank was born in 1924 which allowed him to capture post war images which earned him modern-day comparisons to Tocqueville as his images were fresh and skeptical perspective of American society. He would later use film and video, and experimented with that medium.
Frank attitude to his fame is indifferent, fittingly, as his works chronically not celebrities but the marginal American on the street. It was his skepticism with secular religion of wholesomeness and cheer that gave him a unique visual.
A quote from photographer Elliott Erwitt about Robert Frank and his black and white photography:
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.
The Americans showed a different America than the wholesome, nonconfrontational photo essays offered in some popular magazines. Frank’s subjects weren’t necessarily living the American dream of the 1950s: They were factory workers in Detroit, transvestites in New York, black passengers on a segregated trolley in New Orleans. Frank didn’t even get much support from the art world, he recalls.
“The Museum of Modern Art wouldn’t even sell the book,” Frank says. “But the younger people caught on.”
“Robert Frank…he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.” – Jack Kerouac, Beat Generation poet and novelist
“I’d never seen anything like it, Robert Frank came out here and he just showed that you could see the USA until you spit blood.” – Ed Ruscha, photographer
Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey
Trolley – New Orleans
Woman In A Car – Butte, Montana
Rodeo – New York City
Funeral – Dt Helena, South Carolina
I Am A Man Protest – February, 1968 – Memphis, Tennessee
Charleston, South Carolina
Shoe Shine
