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The monumental photographer and filmmaker of Swiss origin Robert Frank, whose artistic vision served as a seven-decade journey through the vernacular American landscape, has passed away. He was ninety-four years old. Peter MacGill of Pace-MacGill, who has represented Frank's work since 1983, has confirmed his death.
After studying photography and graphic design in Switzerland, Frank moved to New York in 1947. "I've never lived so much in a week here," he writes to his Swiss Jewish parents. shortly after his arrival. He quickly won commercial contracts for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and befriends artists and poets, including Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, Walker Evans, Jonas Mekas and Willem de Kooning. His first photography book, originally published in France as Americans (The Americans, 1958) would become a defining document of the post-war United States – a disjointed black-and-white dissertation whose depraved depictions of American culture, including its racial and class disparities, were opposed to conformism of the country. Despite a generally negative critical reception, the book has influenced countless photographers around the world, who have found a crude alternative to Henri Cartier-Bresson's famous "decisive moment". As Jack Kerouac wrote in his introduction often quoted for the American edition: "After seeing these images, you end up no longer knowing if a jukebox is sadder than a coffin. "
Shortly after publication Americans, Frank focused on cinema and codirecta his first feature film, Shoot my daisyWith the painter Alfred Leslie in 1959. Mekas, then Village Voice Critic and co-founder of 1960, along with Frank and other independent filmmakers, the New American Cinema Group – defended Frank's film as a film that indicated "new ways, new ways out of the frozen offensive and senility in the middle of our century, a new theme, a new sensibility. MacGill, a longtime friend, hinted that Frank would remember him for his work at the movies, rather than as a photographer.
J. Hoberman, in the April 2007 issue of Artforum, Wrote: "populated by bohemian personalities playing essentially between them, blurring the distinction between documentary and artifice, Shoot my daisy foreshadowed Frank's subsequent interests. The dialectic between staging and non-staging, as well as between celebrity and darkness, informs his impure reporting. . . as well as smaller, more personal, process-oriented films, many of which derived their integrity from the feeling that the filmmaker did not care what they were projected. "
In the documentary portrait of the artist, Israel Israel Do not blink – Robert Frank (2016), Frank was asked what makes a good picture. "Sharp, number one," said Frank. "Make sure they see the eyes, hopefully, the nose, smiling, say cheese. The essential: to finish quickly. Get people when they are not aware of the camera. Usually, the first image is the best.
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