Iconic photographer Robert Frank died on Monday in Inverness, Nova Scotia at age 94. Often called one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, he was best known for his book The Americans. Published in the United States in 1959 — and a year prior in France — the book contained black-and-white photographs taken as Frank traveled across a Cold War-rattled U.S. in the mid-50s. Quite literally, he was a man who had been everywhere: Detroit; Savannah, Georgia; Miami Beach; New Orleans; Houston; Chicago; Reno, Nevada; Los Angeles; and countless other cities.
During that cross-country trip, over 28,000 photos were taken. Of them, he selected 83 to be in The Americans, which includes a foreword by Jack Kerouac (Beat generation pioneer and author of On the Road). Grainy with an air of spontaneity and raw authenticity, much of his work chips away at an America that was obscured by idyllic, but false, conceptions of sanitized suburban life; instead he captured a disillusioned post-war America, work that resonated with the emerging counterculture movement of the 1960s.
Born in Zürich, Switzerland in 1924 to Jewish parents — Frank’s mother, Regina, was Swiss while his father, Hermann, was German — he would later emigrate to New York City in 1947 as a 20-something. (Following World War I, his father lost his citizenship because he was Jewish and applied for Swiss citizenship both for himself and his sons. Frank’s family remained in the country during World War II.) Once in NYC, he took a job as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar.
His life and work was chronicled in late 2017 by author RJ Smith, former senior editor of Cincinnati Magazine, in the biography American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank. At the time of its release, Smith told CityBeat Arts & Culture Editor Steven Rosen that, in writing the book, he traced Frank’s roots and history to better understand how The Americans came to be.
“He had an amazing eye and amazing self-confidence,” Smith told Rosen in the interview. “He studied graphic design and photojournalism in Zürich in the 1930s and early 1940s, when so much was going on visually at the newsstands and on posters. And coming to New York, he was absorbing ideas frequently.”
As a magazine photographer, Frank was able to travel around the U.S. In doing so, he began to see material around him that would later inspire The Americans.
“He saw things that we, by and large, accept as truths today about what this county can do to people without a lot of power or money, or who are isolated geographically,” Smith said. “He saw that and showed us that was a big part of who we are.”
Though he never again made a photographic project as impactful as The Americans, he’s also known for his never-released documentary Cocksucker Blues, which followed the Rolling Stones during their 1972 Exile on Main St. American tour. Being upset with the film for showing too much sex and heavy drug use, the band sued Frank to keep the film from being released. A court order ruled that the film was not be shown more than five times a year and only if Frank was in attendance, but the dispute garnered much media attention. Other films by Frank include Me and My Brother, Keep Busy and Candy Mountain, the latter of which was co-directed with Rudy Wurlitzer.
Upon his death, The New Yorker‘s Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Frank’s work on The Americans “ranked with Dylan, Warhol, and Motown as a revelation something like a celestial visitation and something like being knocked off a cliff into a free fall so giddy as to obviate any fret about hard landings…Frank had exalted photographic form by shattering it against the stone of the wonderful and (oh, yeah) horrible real.”
This article appears in Sep 11-18, 2019.
