VoxPhotographs Weblog

Click here to read an intriguing article in the April, 2008 issue of Vanity Fair about Robert Frank’s recent trip to China at age 83.

At last week’s salon at VoxPhotographs (hosted by Brenton Hamilton of Maine Media Workshops) we were discussing Robert Frank’s The Americans, along with Aaron Siskind’s radical (for the times) photographs – to try and better understand the American fifties culture. Brenton mentioned the Vanity Fair article, and a friend who happened to have the magazine handy lent it to me. I’m glad I read it.

Frank’s childhood in Switzerland was replete with detachment, disillusionment and parental tension. He learned early to instinctively parse the essence of the scenes pulsing around him and used this insight to make what some people feel are the most iconic shots of American life ever made. The beat artists and poets of the 50′s drew him like a magnet and his inspirations were Walker Evans and Bill Brandt. So, it comes as no surprise that he was particularly in tune to documenting the fringes of any situation.

You’re not going to like Robert Frank when you finish this article, but I gained some serious insight into his work by reading it. There is no doubt in my mind that The Americans forever changed photography in America and beyond. Pretty important stuff.

Most astonishing is to understand that Frank shot 28,000 photographs on his Guggenheim-supported trips zigzagging across the USA in 1955-56, and that in the end he chose only 83 carefully sequenced images to represent the absolute essence of his impressions.

From our discussion last week I learned Frank has come to despise the endless attention The Americans has received at the expense of all of the rest of his creative work since. He is sick to death of talking and answering questions about it. But he has made millions from it and is internationally renowned because of it. He would have made his father proud – a man whose own dream to be a famous interior designer was quashed by a loveless marriage, leaving him cold, distant and bitter.

Well, if nothing else, Robert Frank understands the uniqueness of America by observing his adopted country over the last five decades – as he says in the article – “Essentially, an American is a free man. There is no history. The American Dream? Well, I don’t know. But there, everything is possible.” Well and truly said from my experience. Only in America.