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DAY 323 | FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHERS |
Robert Frank (1924–)
AN AMERICAN STATEMENT
In 1955, at the prompting of friend and fellow photographer Walker Evans, Robert Frank secured a Guggenheim grant to travel across America.1 Over the next two years, Frank took over 28,000 shots, eventually edited into a book titled The Americans. It was a fresh yet skeptical view of American society, which the Swiss-born photographer found to be fast, lonely, and far too concerned with money.
Frank’s distinctive photographic style, with its asymmetrical compositions and blurred edges was completely unconventional at the time. Some say it is the visual counterpart to the Beat culture, and Frank did have close ties with both Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. The book generated huge controversy, and was widely panned in photography magazines.
The bleakness of Frank’s work is a pervading theme, which is not surprising, as he originally turned to photography for solace during the dark period of World War II. He emigrated to the United States in 1947, and was hired by Harper’s Bazaar, but soon left to travel extensively, before returning to work for McCall’s, Vogue, and Fortune.
After the publication of The Americans, he gave up photography to work in video, with one of his more infamous films chronicling the drug-fueled sexploits of the Rolling Stones. He returned to photography in the 1970s and now creates collage works that incorporate words and multiple frames of images that are intensely distorted and scratched. —GC