Influence & Inspiration - Robert Frank

Robert Frank is an American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans,

Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ . . . ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century."  Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

Born in Switzerland Frank states in the 2005 documentary "Leaving Home, Coming Home" by Director Gerald Fox, that his mother, Rosa, had a Swiss passport, while his father, Hermann originating from Frankfurt, Germany had become stateless after losing his German citizenship as a Jew. They had to apply for the Swiss citizenship of Frank and his older brother, Manfred. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression.

He turned to photography and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before he created his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar.

In 1950  Frank met Edward Steichen and  participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Though he was initially optimistic about the United States' society and culture, Frank's perspective quickly changed as he confronted the fast pace of American life and what he saw as an overemphasis on money. He now saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a perspective that became evident in his later photography.

With the aid of his major artistic influence, the photographer Walker Evans, Frank secured a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph all strata of its society.  During the trip Frank took 28,000 photographs of which 83 were selected by him for the publication The Americans.

Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Frank met Beat writer Jack Kerouac on the sidewalk outside a party and showed him the photographs from his travels. Kerouac immediately told Frank "Sure I can write something about these pictures," and he contributed the introduction to the U.S. edition of The Americans.

This divergence from contemporary photographic standards gave Frank difficulty at first in securing an American publisher. Les Américains was first published in 1958 by Robert Delpire in Paris, and finally in 1959 in the United States by Grove Press, where it initially received substantial criticism. Popular Photography, for one, derided his images as "meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness." Though sales were also poor at first, the fact that the introduction was by the popular Kerouac helped it reach a larger audience. Over time and through its inspiration of later artists, The Americans became a seminal work in American photography and art history, and is the work with which Frank is most clearly identified.

In 1961, Frank received his first individual show, entitled Robert Frank: Photographer, at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also showed at MoMA in New York in 1962.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of The Americans, a new edition was released worldwide on May 30, 2008.

The National Gallery of Art based in Washington DC owns the largest collection of Robert Franks works and to celebrate Franks 90^th birthday they have digitised and developed an online repository of his work.

It includes 624 photographs, 2,967 contact sheets, and 1,344 work prints that span from 1937 to 2005.  It is a must see for anyone interested in film or street photography.

The Robert Frank Collection can be found here.