Robert Frank (born November 9, 1924) is an important figure in American
photography and film . His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The
Americans , was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de
Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Frank
later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating
photographs and photomontage.
Background and early photography career
Frank was born in Switzerland. Frank states in the 2005 documentary "Leaving
Home, Coming Home" by Director Gerald Fox, that his mother, Rosa (other sources state her name as Regina), 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, in part as a means to escape the confines of his business-
oriented family and home, 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 . He
soon left to travel in South America and Europe. He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru , and returned to the U.S. in
1950. That year was momentous for Frank, who, after meeting Edward Steichen , participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); he also married fellow artist Mary Frank née Mary Lockspeiser, with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo.
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. Frank's own dissatisfaction with the control that editors exercised over his work also undoubtedly colored his
experience. He continued to travel, moving his family briefly to Paris . In 1953, he returned to New York and continued to work as a freelance
photojournalist for magazines including McCall's , Vogue , and Fortune . Associating with other contemporary photographers such as Saul Leiter and
Diane Arbus, he helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 1950s.
The Americans
Main article: The Americans (photography)
With the aid of his major artistic influence, the photographer Walker Evans , Frank secured a grant
from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1955 to travel across the United States
and photograph all strata of its society. Cities he visited included Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan;
Savannah, Georgia ; Miami Beach and St. Petersburg, Florida ; New Orleans, Louisiana ; Houston,
Texas ; Los Angeles, California ; Reno, Nevada ; Salt Lake City, Utah ; Butte, Montana ; and Chicago,
Illinois . [1] He took his family along with him for part of his series of road trips over the next two
years, during which time he took 28,000 shots. Only 83 of those were finally selected by him for
publication in The Americans . Frank's journey was not without incident. He later recalled the anti-
Semitism to which he was subject in a small Arkansas town.
“I remember the guy [policeman] took me into the police station, and he sat there and put his feet
on the table. It came out that I was Jewish because I had a letter from the Guggenheim Foundation.
They really were primitive.” He was told by the sheriff, “Well, we have to get somebody who speaks
Yiddish. They wanted to make a thing out of it. It was the only time it happened on the trip. They
put me in jail. It was scary. Nobody knew I was there.” [2][3] [ dead link ]
Elsewhere in the South , he was told by a sheriff that he had "an hour to leave town."
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 . Frank also became lifelong friends with Allen Ginsberg , and was one of the main visual artists to document the Beat
subculture, which felt an affinity with Frank's interest in documenting the tensions between the optimism of the 1950s and the realities of class and
racial differences. The irony that Frank found in the gloss of American culture and wealth over this tension gave his photographs a clear contrast to
those of most contemporary American photojournalists , as did his use of unusual focus, low lighting and cropping that deviated from accepted
photographic techniques.
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. Robert Frank
discussed with his publisher, Gerhard Steidl, the idea of producing a new edition using modern scanning and the finest tritone printing. The starting
point was to bring original prints from New York to Göttingen, Germany, where Steidl is based. In July 2007, Frank visited Göttingen. A new format for
the book was worked out and new typography selected. A new cover was designed and Frank chose the book cloth, foil embossing and the endpaper.
Most significantly, as he has done for every edition of The Americans , Frank changed the cropping of many of the photographs, usually cropping less.
Two images were changed completely from the original 1958 and 1959 editions. A celebratory exhibit of The Americans was displayed in 2009 at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. [4]
The second section of the four-section, 2009, SFMOMA [5] exhibition displays Frank’s original application to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
(which funded the primary work on the Americans project), along with vintage contact sheets, letters to photographer Walker Evans and author Jack
Kerouac, and two early manuscript versions of Kerouac’s introduction to the book. Also exhibited are three collages (made from more than 115
original rough work prints) that were assembled under Frank’s supervision in 2007 and 2008, revealing his intended themes as well as his first rounds
of image selection.
Films
By the time The Americans was published in the United States, Frank had moved away from photography to concentrate on filmmaking. Among his
films was the 1959 Pull My Daisy , which was written and narrated by Kerouac and starred Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and others from the Beat circle. The
Beats emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised. Pull My Daisy was accordingly
praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Frank's co-director, Alfred Leslie , revealed in a November 28, 1968 article in the Village Voice
that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank, who shot the film with professional lighting.
In 1960, Frank was staying in Pop artist George Segal 's basement while filming Sin of Jesus with a grant from Walter K. Gutman . Isaac Babel's story
was transformed to center on a woman working on a chicken farm in New Jersey . It was originally supposed to be filmed in six weeks in and around
New Brunswick , but Frank ended up shooting for six months.
His 1972 documentary of the Rolling Stones , Cocksucker Blues , is arguably his best known film. The film shows the Stones while on their '72 tour,
engaging in heavy drug use and group sex. Perhaps more disturbing to the Stones when they saw the finished product, however, was the degree to
which Frank faithfully captured the loneliness and despair of life on the road. Mick Jagger reportedly told Frank, "It's a fucking good film, Robert, but
if it shows in America we'll never be allowed in the country again." The Stones sued to prevent the film's release, and it was disputed whether Frank
as the artist or the Stones as those who hired the artist actually owned the copyright . A court order resolved this with Solomonic wisdom by restricting
the film to being shown no more than five times per year and only in the presence of Frank. Frank's photography also appeared on the cover of the
Rolling Stones' album Exile on Main St. .
Other films by Robert Frank include Me and My Brother (film) , "Sin of Jesus", "Keep Busy", and Candy Mountain which he co-directed with Rudy
Wurlitzer.

Filmography
1959: Pull My Daisy (with Alfred Leslie )
1961: The Sin of Jesus
1963: O.K. End Here
1965/68: Me And My Brother
1969: Conversations in Vermont
1969: Life-Raft Earth
1971: About Me: A Musical
1972: Cocksucker Blues
1975: Keep Busy (with Rudy Wurlitzer)
1980: Life Dances On
1981: Energy and How to Get It (with Rudy Wurlitzer and Gary Hill)
1983: This Song For Jack
1985: Home Improvements
1987: Candy Mountain (with Rudy Wurlitzer)
1989: Hunter
1990: C’est vrai! (One Hour)
1992: Last Supper
1994: Moving Pictures
2002: Paper Route
2004, 2008: True Story

Return to still images
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. However, he largely gave up "straight"
photography to instead create narratives out of constructed images and collages , incorporating words and
multiple frames of images that were directly scratched and distorted on the negatives. None of this later work
has achieved an impact comparable to that of The Americans. As some critics have pointed out, this is
perhaps because Frank began playing with constructed images more than a decade after Robert
Rauschenberg introduced his silkscreen composites—in contrast to The Americans , Frank's later images
simply were not beyond the pale of accepted technique and practice by that time.
Frank and Mary separated in 1969. He remarried, to sculptor June Leaf, and in 1971, moved to the community
of Mabou, Nova Scotia in Cape Breton Island , Nova Scotia in Canada. In 1974, tragedy struck when his
daughter, Andrea, was killed in a plane crash in Tikal, Guatemala . Also around this time, his son, Pablo, was
first hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia . Much of Frank's subsequent work has dealt with the
impact of the loss of both his daughter and subsequently his son, who died in an Allentown, Pennsylvania
hospital in 1994. In 1995, he founded the Andrea Frank Foundation, which provides grants to artists.
Since his move to Nova Scotia, Canada, Frank has divided his time between his home there in a former
fisherman's shack on the coast, and his Bleecker Street loft in New York. He has acquired a reputation for
being a recluse (particularly since the death of Andrea), declining most interviews and public appearances. He
has continued to accept eclectic assignments, however, such as photographing the 1984 Democratic National
Convention , and directing music videos for artists such as New Order ("Run"), and Patti Smith (" Summer
Cannibals "). Frank continues to produce both films and still images, has helped organize several
retrospectives of his art, and his work has been represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York since 1984. [1] In 1994, the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, DC presented the most comprehensive retrospective of Frank's work to date, entitled Moving Out . Frank was awarded the prestigious
Hasselblad Award for photography in 1996. His 1997 award exhibition at the Hasselblad Center in Goteborg, Sweden was entitled Flamingo, as was the
accompanying published catalog.

Exhibitions
2008, Robert Frank, Paris, Museum Folkwang , Essen
2009, The Americans, National Gallery of Art , Washington D C
2009, Robert Frank. Die Filme, C/O Berlin , Berlin
2012, Robert Frank, From the collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur , [6] Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow
2014, Robert Frank In America, from the Cantor Art Center at Stanford collection, Stanford University
Photobooks
1958: Les Americains , French, Published by Robert Delpire, Paris
1959: The Americans , English, introduction by Jack Kerouac
1972: The lines of my hand
1997: Flamingo
2003: Twenty-four Photographs
2006: Come again
2007: London/Wales
2008: Die Amerikaner , German, reconstructed version of "The Americans" by Robert Frank, introduction by Jack Kerouac; Steidl Verlag, Göttingen
2008 in German ISBN 978-3-86521-658-8 . In English ISBN 978-3-86521-584-0 .
2012: Ferne Nähe/Distant Closeness. Hommage für Robert Walser/A Tribute to Robert Walser. ISBN 978-3-9523586-2-7 .
Preface
2010: to: The Silent Aftermath of Space, Caleb Cain Marcus , Damiani