PechaKucha Presentation Summery – Robert Frank

Robert Frank is a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker, who was born in 1924 and became an American binational later. Since the age of 16, he has entered the Swiss photography industry and has received rigorous professional training in photography. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans. With his first photography collection, The Americans, he changed the direction of modern photography in one fell swoop, establishing himself as an undisputed master in the history of photography.

Trolly – New Orleans, 1955. From The Americans © Robert Frank

The Americans was highly influential in post-war American photography. It was first published in France in 1958, and the following year in the United States. Frank took 28,000 shots, and selected 83 for publication. The photographs were notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society. The book as a whole created a complicated portrait of the period that was viewed as skeptical of contemporary values and evocative of ubiquitous loneliness. This collection embodies Frank’s fresh and nuanced outsider’s view of American society. Frank’s aim is to “observe and document the significance of the culture that people who have acquired American citizenship find in the United States, born out of this land, and that is expanding outwards.” He said he “wanted to make truly contemporary records, and the visual impact of such records would even render textual descriptions useless.”

As soon as the book appeared, it was evaluated in two very different ways. Technocracy argues that his photographs are not technically qualified, with many of them untrue in focus and loose composition, while some conservative apologists believe that he ignored the “light” of the United States and photographed the United States with a malicious eye, and the fiercers even labeled him “communist” and “anti-American”. However, time has proven that his Americans have become the best image of the anxiety, restlessness, indifference, and alienation of Americans in the midst of a gold-worship boom and the fear of the Cold War. His photographs, like a prophetic image prophecy, pierced the reality of America’s spiritual desolation and made the light, self-confidence, and joy of the 1950s America morbid.

Parade Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955. From The Americans © Robert Frank

By the time The Americans was published in the United States, Frank had moved away from photography to concentrate on filmmaking. Pull My Daisy (1959), The Sin of Jesus (1960), and Cocksucker Blues (1972) are some of his early film works.

Though Frank continued to be interested in film and video, he returned to still images in the 1970s, publishing his second photographic book, The Lines of My Hand, in 1972. This work has been described as a “visual autobiography”, and consists largely of personal photographs. It established his sometimes confessional, approach to bookmaking. This structure itself mirrors the rhythm of Frank’s life but it is his short personal texts, like diary entries, that fully bring his voice into the book. In its original combination of text and image, its fearless self-reflection, and its insistence on photography and film as equal though different aspects of the artist’s visual language, The Lines of My Hand has become an inspiration for many photographers—not least Robert Frank himself, who continues and expands this approach in the visual diaries he makes today.

Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ftjmJT3u70IUR5m_AQnuk7_rsT8zWTiFBTJ0oD5BxZw/edit?usp=sharing