Petit Journal #48: "Robert Frank. A Foreign Look"
Paris/The Americans
| Robert Frank is major figure of Street Photography. Published in 1958, his book The Americans established him as one of the most influential photographers of his time. The images in his book had a profound impact on generations of photographers. After the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, last year, Jeu de Paume is continuing the celebration of this photographic milestone by presenting Frank’s legendary series alongside the photographs Frank took in Paris between 1949 and 1952 as well as two of his films, Pull My Daisy (1959) and True Story (2004). In these works Frank develops a kind of photographic narrative whose leitmotiv might be, in the case of Paris, the recurring presence of flowers, or, in The Americans, the signs of a world in the throes of deep change. The photographs of Paris reveal the gestation of the subjective style and outsider’s vision that would bear fruit ten years later in The Americans and radically renew the art of documentary photography.
Robert became interested in photography at around the age of twelve. In 1941, he began an apprenticeship with the photographer and graphic designer Hermann Segesser, who introduced him to modern art, and to the work of Paul Klee in particular. From 1942 to 1944, he continued his training in the studio of Michael Wolgensinger (former assistant of Hans Finsler, head of the photography class at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich) and absorbed his ideas about photography. Under the influence of Arnold Kübler, a publisher who championed photojournalism through his magazines (especially du), Frank also ventured into the documentary register by exploring themes related to everyday life. “I didn’t know what I wanted, but I certainly knew what I didn’t want,” he would later recall with regard to these formative years whose end was marked by 40 Photos. This was a spiral-bound portfolio offering a succession of landscape views and street photographs with no obvious narrative or linear connection. After the end of the war, Frank travelled to Paris, Milan and Brussels, tracking down the traces of the conflict with his Rolleiflex and thus laying the foundations of the exploratory approach that he would develop further on his subsequent travels in South America and Europe with his Leica. Rejecting bourgeois conventions and his parents’ materialism, in February 1947 he left the comfortable life that beckoned in Switzerland and travelled to the United States, which for him were the great symbol of freedom. He soon found employment there, but was deeply disappointed by the invasive power of money. In New York he showed 40 Photos to Alexey Brodovitch, who hired him for Harper´s Bazaar. In 1949 he returned to Europe, and there ensued a period of travelling back and forth between the continents. Frank went first to South America and then to Spain, England and Paris, where he absorbed the atmosphere of the Old World. Now married with two children, Frank returned to the United States in 1953, albeit with no great enthusiasm. There he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to make a visual record of American civilisation. The result, after four years of work, would change the history of documentary photography, as well as the image of the United States. Frank created a new iconography of men and women massed together along dreary roads, in sprawling towns or in the empty spaces of a gigantic country. His images fascinated, compelled and shocked. They also won Frank recognition for the originality of his language. He explained his position as follows in 1951: “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.” Towards the end of the 1950s Frank started making films, and later on, videos. These were to a large extent autobiographical and experimental and extended the formal explorations of his Polaroids. In the 1970s he began to explore the interaction of text and image. If Frank’s early work was detached, everything changed as a result of personal tragedy – the death of his two children: his daughter Andrea in 1974 and his son Pablo in 1994. The tone now became intensely introspective, driven by a desire to strip away appearances. Always seeking the truth, he explored both the world around him and the world of his own self. He was “always doing the same images – always looking outside, trying to look inside. Trying to tell something that is true. But maybe nothing is true…” PARIS Although he moved to the United States in 1947, Frank continued to travel back and forth between Europe and New York from 1949 to 1952. Most of the works exhibited here were made at this time, in postwar Paris. Some were printed specially for this hanging. The street is the central theme, with the focus alternating between passers-by, places and objects. Frank revived Baudelaire’s figure of the flâneur observing the spectacle of the street as he strolls through the city. Frank’s early experiences in the New World seem to have sharpened his vision of the Old, and he was aware of the ephemeral nature of what he saw. His photographs of the boulevards, public gardens and street vendors recall the famous documentary photographs taken in Paris by Eugène Atget (1857–1927). Frank catches his subjects with all the subtleties revealed by the moment: lost in thought, standing in crowds or sitting in the metro, lying on a park bench or curling up on the grass. His choice of perspectives is varied. High-angle views or photographs of passers-by taken over the shoulder intensify the presence of the motif and places the viewer at the centre of the photograph. Frank’s Parisian photographs constitute a visual narrative – not exactly a story, but a multitude of snapshots that encourage us to look more attentively at what was the end of an era. THE AMERICANS
The very direct, free style of his American photographs, which turn their back on traditional aesthetic canons, can be compared to the writings of the Beat Generation – whose members he had yet to meet, but would soon befriend – and also bring to mind improvisation in jazz. These places and faces captured on the move are often hazy, the compositions sometimes off-centre, as if the speed of the action allowed the gaze only to fleetingly scan its subject. The prominence and depth of the blacks give the images depth, creating a feeling of abstraction and a distinctive tempo that connect them at a deeper level. Frank spent much of 1956 and 1957 whittling his initial selection of 1,000 photographs down to a final choice of 84 and planning the layout of the French edition that would be published by Robert Delpire in 1958. In the American edition, published the following year by Grove Press, the preface was written by Jack Kerouac and the photographs were presented on the odd pages only, with the opposite page left white (in the French edition, the left-hand pages were occupied by critical texts about the United States). The book was austere, close in spirit to American Photographs by Walker Evans. Frank’s treatment of his subject highlights the artifice and alienation, the distress and inequality of the “American Dream” and offers a vision that is a long way from the public image usually projected at the time. On the back cover of the mock-up, Frank wrote: “America America.” This title, which he eventually dropped, was meant to evoke the chant- or dirge-like quality of the project, and indicate that Frank was inventing a new form. The result is a vision of the United States that is both poetic and political. PULL MY DAISY
Frank’s cinema is like his photography: it pushes back and takes the genre to its limits, but without making that a fixed position. Pull My Daisy was a seminal work for the New American Cinema Group, founded in 1960, with Jonas Mekas and John Cassavetes, to defend the independence of experimental cinema. TRUE STORY True Story (2004) is Frank’s most recent video. Featuring scenes shot in his apartment in New York and house in Nova Scotia, with Frank’s voice-over providing commentary, this work shows him going back to the themes of memory and loss. True Story includes excerpts from earlier films, other photographs, works by Frank’s second wife June Leaf, and letters written by his son Pablo. By turns poignant, pensive, ironic and angry, this autobiography makes no attempt to dress up or explain the facts. True Story brings us face to face with the intensity of feelings and the rawness of hurt, as well as the strength that is needed to work through them and turn them into something life-affirming. |
