|
|
Robert Frank, Charleston, South Carolina, 1955; gelatin silver print; 16-1/4 x 23-1/4 in.; Collection of Susan and Peter MacGill; © Robert Frank |
A 50th Anniversary for Robert Frank's The Americans |
Robert Frank, Trolley—New Orleans, 1955; gelatin silver print; 8-5/8 x 13-1/16 in.; Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005; © Robert Frank.
Robert Frank, Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1955; gelatin silver print; 10-3/4 x 16-5/8 in.; Collection of Barbara and Eugene Schwartz; © Robert Frank.
Robert Frank, Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955; gelatin silver print; 8-3/8 x 12-3/4 in.; Private collection, San Francisco; © Robert Frank.
Robert Frank, Elevator – Miami Beach, 1955; gelatin silver print; 12-3/8 x 18-13/16 in.; Collection Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1969; © Robert Frank.
Robert Frank, Funeral – St. Helena, South Carolina, 1955; gelatin silver print; 15-5/8 x 22-7/8 in.; © Robert Frank.
Robert Frank, City Fathers – Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955; gelatin silver print; 16-1/2 x 22-3/4 in.; Collection Susan and Peter MacGill; © Robert Frank.
Robert Frank, Guggenheim 340/Americans 18 and 19 – New Orleans, November 1955, 1955; contact sheet; 10 x 8-1/16 in.; National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert Frank Collection, gift of Robert Frank; © Robert Frank.
Robert Frank, San Francisco, 1956; gelatin silver print; 13-3/4 x 10-1/16 in.; Private collection, San Francisco; © Robert Frank.
Robert Frank, U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas, 1955; gelatin silver print; image and board 18-3/4 x 12-1/4 in.; Private collection, courtesy Hamiltons Gallery, London; © Robert Frank. |
San Francisco Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, is the most comprehensive and in-depth exploration of Frank's groundbreaking book to date. The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of The Americans, arguably one of the single-most important photography books published since World War II. The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Its San Francisco presentation is overseen by SFMOMA Associate Curator of Photography Corey Keller and is made possible by generous support from the Bernard and Barbro Osher Exhibition Fund and Bob and Randi Fisher. In 1955 and 1956, Swiss-born American photographer Robert Frank (b. 1924) traveled across the United States to photograph, as he wrote, "the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere." During his nine-month journey, he took 767 rolls of film (more than 27,000 images) and made more than 1,000 work prints. He then spent a year editing, selecting, and sequencing the photographs, linking them thematically, conceptually, formally, emotionally, and linguistically. The result was The Americans, a series of photographs that looked beneath the surface of life in the United States to reveal a culture on the brink of massive social upheaval. Frank’s photographs were created with a hand-held Leica camera, often using a wide-angle lens, resulting in compositions that appear unplanned, spontaneous, and are ultimately revealing. The original American edition of the book included an introduction by Jack Kerouac, the Beat writer most famous for his novel On the Road. Describing the emotional scope of Frank’s portfolio, Kerouac wrote: “After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.” During Robert Frank’s 10,000-mile journey across more than 30 states spanning nine months in 1955-1956, the young photographer took 767 rolls of film — more than 27,000 images — and made more than 1,000 work prints. He spent a year editing and selecting the photographs and constructing the sequence. When The Americans was published in 1958/1959, it revealed a country that many knew existed but few had acknowledged. Frank depicted a people often plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians, and rendered numb by a rapidly rising culture of consumption. Yet he also found new areas of beauty in overlooked corners of the country and in the process helped redefine the icons of America. In his photographs of diners, cars, and even the road itself, Frank pioneered a seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style that was as innovative as his subjects. Also groundbreaking was the way he tightly sequenced his photographs in The Americans, linking them thematically, conceptually, formally, emotionally, and linguistically to present a haunting picture of mid-century America. 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 its society at all strata. 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. While driving through Arkansas, Frank was arbitrarily thrown in jail after being stopped by the police; 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 Frank's 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, Kerouac's introduction helped it reach a larger audience because of the popularity of the Beat phenomenon. Over time and through its inspiration of later artists, The Americans became a seminal work in American photography and art history, and is considered 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. When it was first published (in France in 1958; in the United States in 1959), The Americans revealed a country that many knew existed but which few had acknowledged. The book showed Americans as a people plagued by racism, ill-served by politicians, and numbed by a rapidly rising culture of consumption. But in addition to exposing a darker side of the United States, Frank shed light on the beauty of overlooked corners of the country. In his photographs of diners, cars, and even "the road" itself, Frank helped to redefine the icons of America. Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans is grouped into four sections. The first section examines the roots of The Americans, not only in Frank's earlier handmade books—including 40 Fotos (1946), Peru (1949), and Black White and Things (1952)—but also in other sequences of photographs he made at this time, such as People You Don't See (1952). The first section also present books by his contemporaries and influences, such as Bill Brandt, Alexey Brodovitch, and Jakob Tuggener. The second section displays Frank's original application to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (which funded his 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 the Frank's supervision in 2007 and 2008, revealing his intended themes as well as his first rounds of images selection. The third section is composed of all 83 images from The Americans in their original sequence, often in the form of rarely exhibited vintage prints. The fourth section addresses the impact that The Americans had on Frank's subsequent career and includes a film Frank made in 2008 especially for this exhibition. Robert Frank was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Switzerland. Frank's mother, Rosa, was Swiss, but his father, Hermann, had become stateless after World War I and 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 Lockspeiser, with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo. Though he was initially optimistic about the United States, 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 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. The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication, Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, produced in two different editions (a softcover and an expanded hardcover) and published with assistance from The Getty Foundation. Published by the National Gallery of Art — in association with Steidl and distributed by D.A.P. — the catalogue will be available at the SFMOMA MuseumStore. The softcover edition includes reproductions all of the works in the exhibition, along with essays by Sarah Greenough, Anne Wilkes Tucker, Stuart Alexander, Martin Gasser, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Michel Frizot, Luc Sante, and Philip Brookman. Priced at $45, it comprises 396 pages with 6 four-color, 168 tritone, and 210 duotone images. The hardcover is an expanded edition that includes all of the material in the softcover, plus reproductions of all of the contact sheets for images in The Americans, a chronology, a map, and two appendices. Priced at $75, it comprises 528 pages with 108 four-color, 168 tritone, and 210 duotone images.
Robert Frank, Movie premiere, Hollywood, 1955; gelatin silver print; 10-1/16 x 6-3/4; Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchase, 2002; © Robert Frank.
Robert Frank, Political Rally - Chicago, 1956; gelatin silver print; 23-1/4 x 14-3/8 in.; Collection Betsy Karel; © Robert Frank. |
Robert Frank, Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1955; gelatin silver print; 8-3/16 x 11-5/8 in.; Private collection; © Robert Frank |
