Robert Frank: Looking In - Exhibition Review

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Frank's, "The Americans," in the US.  The book was initially panned by all the critics which is not surprising in the Ozzie and Harriet tinged late 50's. Perhaps Frank provided a viewpoint that rang a bit too true. Still the photographs would change the course of modern photography, and "The Americans"  would become a seminal work in the history of the medium. For several years I had hoped there would be a major exhibition to mark this anniversary and was not let down.

Originally organized by the National Gallery of Art, the images were placed in sequential order as they were originally published, and there were letters between Robert Frank and Walker Evans, various edits of the letter applying for the Guggenheim grant, Jack Kerouac's rough draft for the forward to the book, contact sheets, fixer stained work prints, and of course vintage prints. The ephemera provided not only an historic backdrop for the project but also added an intimacy. The humor and warmth of the correspondence between Frank and Evans had me laughing out loud more than once in the galleries.

I was impressed by the large vintage print of the flag blowing in the wind and the two little girls beneath it. I had never noticed just how old and frayed this flag was, in fact it even had patches on it. There were other details too. I could have stared at some of the prints for hours - all the signs in diners, 50's fashions, old cars, and cracks in concrete were mesmerizing. Seeing the images on a larger scale, removed from the familiarity of the dogged pages of my book, made me think about what it must have been like to be a white foreigner at an all black funeral in the south, or to be confronted by an angry man who realized his picture was being taken without permission. It also made me aware of the risk required to make this body of work. The contact sheets gave me insight into his ability to see, and an appreciation of his editing. And while I know the data about rolls of film, miles traveled, and months spent I was still amazed by the massive archive created over such a short period of time.

I have used the image from New Orleans of the segregated bus as a departure point to discuss how a camera can be used for political purposes, and had researched the timeline of this image and the Civil Rights Movement, however I did not know that it was taken less than three weeks before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. Was it because Frank was a foreigner that he could see the fault lines more clearly?

I was also struck by how nostalgic film already seems, and just how well those old Lecia lenses performed. It also occurred to me just how improbable a project like this would be today. Considering Frank was thrown in jail for being a foreigner in a small town, imagine what would have happened in a post-911 world. Could a stranger travel the country and make these images without raising suspicions and risking harassment and arrest on a regular basis? And what about model releases? Would people be willing to sign them, and without them would this book have ever seen the light of day in our current litigious culture?

For a project so reviled just 50 years ago, I was amazed by how jammed packed the galleries were, and what an impact one person can have with a camera. If I had seen it earlier in the year, I probably would have tried to see it again, but as fate would have it I didn't see the exhibit until the last week of the US tour, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and I had to fly halfway across the country to get there. There were record lows in NYC that week, no hot water in the hotel, and a beautiful snow fell on the last day delaying flights, but it was totally worth it.

There are several links to reviews of the exhibit in this earlier post, and here is a newer NPR Stream about the exhibit.

Photo Credit: Rene' West, © 2009

50th Anniversary of "The Americans"

It’s been 50 years since Robert Frank published his influential monograph The American’s. Over the past year I have enjoyed thinking about the power of the images in this book. An anniversary exhibit of the project has been traveling the country and is currently up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Holland Cotter’s NY Times exhibition review he succinctly describes Robert Frank’s project The Americans, although the title “America Captured in a Flash” is a bit goofy since the photographs were shot in natural light. He writes about the response to the book when it was published:

Once rejected for its pessimism, now sanctified for its political prescience, the book distills heartache, anger, fear, loneliness and occasional joy into a brew that has changed flavor with time but stayed potent.

And he writes about the man making the pictures:

… For some people a camera is armor. For Mr. Frank it was an antenna, a feeling and thinking device.

…pictures by a foreigner who came to America impulsively, traveled our roads restlessly, and by not fully knowing our language heard it correctly and told us, the way we could not, truths about ourselves.

Other press about the show includes:

An interview on NPR with the elevator girl, 50 years after the photograph was taken, who discovers herself on the wall of a museum. In the foreword, Jack Kerouac writes: "That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what's her name & address?" Now we know.

Anthony Lane’s review in the New Yorker discusses Frank’s selection process based on contact sheets in the exhibition. He continues with the elevator girl:

…it is worth consulting the relevant contact strip: fourteen shots of the same woman, at least half of them catching her in the act of a smile—a polite gesture adopted for those riding beside her, you might say, but then professional courtesy is no less a national trait than the ruefulness on which Frank preferred to focus. For every little ole lonely girl, there will have been a dozen young elevator operators as perky and unslumped as Shirley MacLaine in “The Apartment” (1960), fending off the office demons and fighting down their disappointments.

The Met is the last stop on this exhibition tour, it's up right now and runs through Jan. 3, 2010. I totally want to see it.

Image Credit: Cover of Robert Frank's, "The Americans", 6th edition.