Robert Frank, 1924 – 2019

Robert Frank, Elevator - Miami Beach, 1955

Robert Frank died on 9 September 2019 

Frank’s The Americans was published in 1958/59. It is, I think, one of the great works of art of the Twentieth Century.

The pictures rewrote the rules of photography… Their blurry casualness and tilted frames jazzed nearly every photographer of note to come along in the 60’s. (Woodward, G., 1994)

Anybody doesnt like these pitchers dont like potry, see? Anybody dont like potry go home see Television shots of big hatted cowboys being tolerated by kind horses.

Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.

To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address? (Kerouac, J. 1959)

When Garry Winogrand was asked to talk about other photographers’ work that he found interesting he picked out Robert Frank’s picture of a gas station:

It’s… a photograph of nothing, there’s nothing happening there. I mean, the subject matter has no dramatic ability of its own whatsoever and yet somehow it looks, what it is, it’s the most mundane—and there’s nothing happening, there’s no physical action… When [Robert Frank] took that photograph he couldn’t possibly know—he just could not know that it would work, that it would be a photograph. He knew he probably had a chance. In other words, he cannot know what that’s going to look like as a photograph. … I don’t give a rap about gasoline stations. . . (Winogrand, G. 2012) 

Robert Frank, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1955

Robert Frank, Covered Car - Long Beach, California, 1956

Robert Frank, Car Accident - U.S. 66, between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona, 1956

Robert Frank, Bar - Miami BeaNew York City, 1955

Robert Frank, Los Angeles, 1956

Robert Frank, Rodeo - New York City, 1955

Robert Frank, Indianapolis, 1956

Robert Frank, U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas, 1955

Cobb, Jelani (2019) “How Robert Frank’s Photographs Helped DefineAmerica”, The New Yorker

Dawidoff, Nicholas (2015) “The Man Who Saw America”, The New York Times Magazine

Gefter, Phillip (2019) “Robert Frank Dies: Pivotal DocumentartyPhotographer Was 94”, The New York Times

Hopkinson, Amanda (2019), “Robert Frank obituary”, The Guardian

Kerouac, Jack (1959) [Introduction to Robert Frank (1993) The Americans, Manchester: Cornerhouse Publication)

 Murphy, Michael David (2014) “American Beauty”, Medium

O’Hagan, Sean (2019) “Robert Frank: the outsider genius whosephotographs laid Bare America’s soul”, The Guardian

Winogrand, Garry (2012) “Monkeys Make the Problem More Difficult – ACollective Interview with Garry Winogrand (1970)”, ASX: American Suburb X

Woodward, Richard B. (1994) “Where Have You Gone, Robert Frank?”, The New York Times