Robert Frank

Photographer

• Born: November 9, 1924
• Place of Birth: Zurich, Switzerland
• Died: September 9, 2019

SWISS-BORN PHOTOGRAPHER AND FILM DIRECTOR

Frank was a photographer who gained renown for his photographs of American life collected during his travels throughout the United States from 1955 to 1956.

AREA OF ACHIEVEMENT: Photography

Early Life

Robert Frank was born to Hermann and Regina Frank, both Jewish, in 1924. Hermann was German, but he moved to Zurich after World War I to import Swedish radios. Frank grew up during the time of the Nazi rise and occupation of the countries surrounding Switzerland. The family was worried that the Nazis might occupy Switzerland, but this did not occur. Frank’s father, however, lost most of his family, who had been living in Germany. The Frank family lived in relative luxury during this time, having many nice possessions and even a maid. Frank often skied in the Swiss Alps.

As a young man, Frank was impressed by photographic exhibitions that were focused on a central theme. He went into a career in photography rather than into his father’s business when he graduated from high school in 1940. He became an apprentice for a Swiss photographer, from whom he learned the basics of taking pictures and of making prints.

In 1942, Frank went to work for an advertising photographer, Michael Wolgensinger, from whom he learned to analyze and to visualize a final print for an advertisement. He also learned to make contact prints and to organize his photographs. Wolgensinger also showed Frank how an organized group of photographs could make a dramatic effect in a book. Frank made his own book in 1946 called Forty Fotos.

Life’s Work

Frank went to New York City in 1946 because it had many famous photographers and artists with whom he could become acquainted. He soon got a job with the magazine Harper’s Bazaar, and he was assigned to photograph fashion accessories. Frank did not like the commercial nature of fashion photography, so he quit the magazine in 1947, but he continued to work for similar magazines. He also took pictures of the New York City area. Many of these photographs were blurry, had poor exposures, and were unusual in composition. Frank liked the impressionist effect that such photographs gave to a viewer.

Frank traveled for about four years, starting in 1948, to take photographs in Central America, South America, and Europe. Many of his pictures were published in short books such as Peru (1949) and Mary’s Book (1949). These books gave the viewer only a vague impression of the areas photographed with little written explanations, and many pictures were, as some reviewers would say, poorly printed and organized.

Some of Frank’s photographs were published in major magazines such as Life and Photo Arts. Some photographs were used by the famous photographer Edward Steichen for exhibitions in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Steichen also encouraged Frank to exhibit his photographs elsewhere.

Frank made friends with another famous photographer, Walker Evans, in 1954, and Evans encouraged Frank to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship, which Frank received in 1955. With this money, Frank traveled around the United States for several years, taking nearly thirty thousand pictures. Frank selected eighty-three photographs from these travels to put in a book, The Americans, which was published in Europe in 1958 and in the United States in 1959. The photographs gave a vivid impression of the United States, and, as many have come to believe, this was his most important book. Many of the initial reviews of The Americans were, however, quite negative, with the reviewers criticizing the extreme blurring, the muddy look, and the graininess of some photographs and the apparent lack of care to make an adequate photograph. Nevertheless, this book has become a classic, and it has been republished several times.

Frank moved to making short films after 1959 that often appeared to have been poorly improvised, even though he usually had a written script. Most of these films did not make much money. In 1972, he made a famous film about the Rolling Stones that documented not only their performances but also their drug use and sexual encounters.

During the time he made films, he also continued to take and to publish photographs. For example, he published The Lines of My Hand (1972), which contains a variety of photographs from his worldwide travels. However, in addition to advancing age, Frank produced few new photographs or films following the suicide of his son, Pablo, who had struggled with schizophrenia and battled lymphoma, in 1994 (his daughter, Andrea, had died in a plane crash in 1974); he had been devastated by the loss of his son, explaining that it was difficult for him to find the concentration or desire to work in his art.

Though Frank was offered several honors over the ensuing years, he had become more of a recluse and often did not attend ceremonies or exhibitions. In recognition of the lasting poignancy of his earlier work, from late September 2009 to early January 2010, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, organized an exhibit centered around The Americans, titled Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans. In 2014, he did venture out to receive a special award recognizing his lifetime of work from the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation, which provides one of the biggest monetary art awards in Europe. The following year, Laura Israel presented Don't Blink: Robert Frank, a documentary of Frank that chronicles his life before and after making his most famous project; it premiered at the New York Film Festival. With Gerhard Steidl, Frank organized a large exhibition of his work that includes a collection of more than one hundred photographs and several of his films to be displayed on tour throughout the United States. Titled Robert Frank: Books and Films 1947–2016, the exhibit was launched in New York in early 2016. He passed away on September 9, 2019, at the age of ninety-four.

Significance

Frank developed a photographic style that was often similar to Impressionist paintings, to give a certain feeling about his subjects. Even though many of his photographs were initially criticized, many reviewers later recognized that his photographs about racial and religious discrimination, average people going about their work, and people’s everyday lives were an important documentary on the society of his time. Young people kissing, people sitting or sleeping in parks, people at lunch counters, people working on assembly lines, and a person dressed as a cowboy in a big city became the important subjects of his photographs.

Bibliography

Bengal, Rebecca. "A New Documentary about Robert Frank Goes beyond The Americans." Vogue. Condé Nast, 27 Sept. 2015. Web. 25 Apr. 2016.

Dawidoff, Nicholas. "The Man Who Saw America." New York Times. New York Times, 2 July 2015. Web. 25 Apr. 2016.

Frank, Robert. Hold Still; Keep Going. New York: Scalo, 2001. Print.

Frank, Robert. The Lines of My Hand. Rev. ed. New York: Pantheon, 1989. Print.

Greenough, Sarah. Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans. Washington, DC: Natl. Gallery of Art, 2009. Print.

Martin, Bryan. "The Everlasting Influence of Robert Frank's 'The Americans'." Sotheby's, 9 Feb. 2023, www.sothebys.com/en/articles/the-everlasting-influence-of-robert-franks-the-americans. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

O'Hagan, Sean. "Robert Frank at Ninety: The Photographer Who Revealed America Won't Look Back." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 7 Nov. 2014. Web. 25 Apr. 2016.