Fashion
Is Robert Frank’s Late Work Worth Viewing?
A centenary exhibition of the photographer revered for a groundbreaking book makes the case for what came after — but was often left in the shade.
Robert Frank never recovered from the success of “The Americans.” On its publication in the United States in 1959, the book was initially excoriated as un-American, particularly in the photography magazines, for its sour, disillusioned take on life in this country. The rich looked bored, the poor desperate, the city fathers fatuous, and the flags threadbare or soiled. What’s more, specialists in photography faulted his technique for muddiness, grain and blur.
But in a slow burn, Frank’s willful violation of the conventional rules of photography was understood to serve the purpose of personal expression, and his dissection of national alienation and social divides was deemed prophetic. The smoke blew away, and “The Americans” stood clearly as a towering monument, one of the most important and influential books in the history of photography.
Frank hated that. In the early ’60s, he renounced still photography in favor of filmmaking. When he went back in the ’70s to making photographs — “in the time left over between films or film projects,” as he put it — he eschewed the street photography that had established his reputation. Instead, he mostly made studio or landscape pictures, which he liked to splice together into montages or embellish with scratched and stenciled words.
“From the Bus, New York,” 1958. After his road trip for “The Americans,” Frank shot from a moving Fifth Avenue bus, capturing cross-sections of New York life. It was a transitional image introducing movement into still photography before he committed himself to filmmaking.Credit…Robert Frank/The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, via Museum of Modern Art, NY
It’s this late work — if such a rubric can be applied to the six decades of movie, video and photo production that preceded his death at 94 in 2019 — that is the focus of “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue,” opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Lucy Gallun, the exhibition marks the centenary of Frank’s birth and is his first solo show at MoMA. Although there are some omissions (his return to documentary photography in Beirut in 1991, for example), it presents as eloquent a case as can be made for this later art, often left in the shade by what came before.
Frank felt trapped by the expectations and pigeonholing that the lionization of “The Americans” induced, and he recoiled in horror at the prospect of repeating himself. Beyond that, he gave various explanations over the years for why he abandoned the 35-millimeter camera that he brandished like a sorcerer’s wand. He explained that he had lost faith in the capacity of a single photograph to convey the truth. And his search had turned inward. “The truth is the way to reveal something about your life, your thoughts, where you stand,” he said. He believed film was a better way to do that.
