![]() ![]() ![]() Frank supported himself sporadically, if reluctantly, with commercial work. Their son, Pablo (named after the cellist Pablo Casals), was born in 1951, and his daughter, Andrea, in 1954.Īll the while Mr. At the Cedar Tavern, a legendary neighborhood bar, he would drink and argue with the artists of the period. Frank remembered seeing through a window Willem de Kooning, paint brush in hand, pacing his studio in his underwear. They married the following year and settled in Manhattan, in the East Village, in the heart of a vibrant Abstract Expressionist art scene. In 1949, he met the artist Mary Lockspeiser, nine years his junior, and gave her, too, a handmade book of photographs, which he had taken that year in Paris. The pictures had a profound influence on the way photographers began to approach not only their subjects but also the picture frame. Frank may well have been the unwitting father of what became known in the late 1960s as “the snapshot aesthetic,” a personal offhand style that sought to capture the look and feel of spontaneity in an authentic moment. Twenty years later, Gene Thornton, writing in The New York Times, said the book ranked “with Alexis de Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ and Henry James’ ‘The American Scene’ as one of the definitive statements of what this country is about.” ‘Snapshot Aesthetic’ “That crazy feeling in America,” Kerouac wrote, “when the sun is hot and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) and with agility, mystery, genius, sadness, and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.” Frank met Jack Kerouac, who had written about his own American journeys in the 1957 novel “On the Road.” Kerouac wrote the introduction to the American edition of Mr. It was only after completing the cross-country trips chronicled in “The Americans” that Mr. In the American edition, published the next year by Grove Press, the pictures were allowed to tell their own story, without text, as Mr. Frank’s photographs as illustrations for essays by French writers. “Les Americains,” first published in France by Robert Delpire in 1958, used Mr. Yet at the core of his social criticism was a romantic idea about finding and honoring what was true and good about the United States. ![]() Frank had come to detest the American drive for conformity, and the book was thought to be an indictment of American society, stripping away the picture-perfect vision of the country and its veneer of breezy optimism put forward in magazines and movies and on television. Frank, the magazine said, was “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption.” ![]() Popular Photography magazine complained about their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.” Mr. The pictures were initially considered warped, smudgy, bitter. The cultural critic Janet Malcolm called him the “Manet of the new photography.”īut recognition was by no means immediate. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon. Frank’s photographs - of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life - were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. “The Americans” challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure. He was best known for his groundbreaking book, “The Americans,” a masterwork of black and white photographs drawn from his cross-country road trips in the mid-1950s and published in 1959. Frank emigrated to New York at the age of 23 as an artistic refugee from what he considered to be the small-minded values of his native country. Frank, a Manhattan resident, had long had a summer home in Mabou, on Cape Breton Island.īorn in Switzerland, Mr. His death, at Inverness Consolidated Memorial Hospital on Cape Breton Island, was confirmed by Peter MacGill, whose Pace-MacGill Gallery in Manhattan has represented Mr. Robert Frank, one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, whose visually raw and personally expressive style was pivotal in changing the course of documentary photography, died on Monday in Inverness, Nova Scotia. ![]()
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