Kubrick-era Still Photography of Robert Frank
PT Caffey
Ahead of His Moment
By W.S. Di PIERO
Anyone with an interest in photography remembers looking for the first
time at Robert Frank's ''The Americans,'' the photo-essay he crafted
after traveling the country on a Guggenheim grant in the mid-1950's.
His vision was news. But before becoming that Robert Frank, he was
already an auspicious artist revolutionizing straight photography.
After emigrating as a young man from Switzerland, the son of a
middle-class family, he went to work as a fashion photographer for
Harper's Bazaar. Though he was good at it, it boxed him in. So in the
early 1950's, this 27-year-old, driven by reckless curiosity and
intuition, took off for London and Wales to work entirely without
restraints. Frank has published only a scant selection of pictures
from that journey. Many stunning, never-before-seen images of that
time are now finally available to us in the exhibition ''Robert Frank:
London/Wales,'' which opens May 10 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in
Washington. (A book of the same name is being published simultaneously
by Scalo.)
Nothing prepared Frank for being dunked into the working-class life of
Welsh miners, but he brought to his task a fresh ecstatic eye, a
feeling of passionate political sympathy and a willingness to mess
with the rules of conventional photography. ''If you work on your
own,'' he says, ''naturally you break rules, because you make the
rules.''
Frank befriended a miner named Ben James. The intimacies shared in
that environment prepared Frank for all the violated privacies he
would document in ''The Americans.'' As four miners emerge from the
pit, the whites of their eyes popping from charred faces, we feel that
Frank has slipped under the skin of a distressed class and brought us
there with him. In 1951, he was already a poet of domestic intimacies.
In one image, his own wife and child cuddle (or cringe) in bed with a
child of the woman they boarded with. In another, Ben James bathes in
a tin tub while his wife reads a newspaper. ''It was a departure for
me to get to know somebody and photograph them,'' Frank says. Later
photographing across America, he admits, ''I didn't feel so good. You
take away something when you photograph people and don't ask their
permission.''
For Frank, the London and Wales projects composed a continuous
narrative. A young gawky boy smoking on a London street cocks an adult
pose while behind him two figures take shape in a fizzy London fog
much as Frank's miners emerge from wooly slag. A young girl and other
travelers wait in a tube station with the same dignified propriety as
colliers in their coal car. These remarkable pictures jump alive and
insinuate themselves into our consciousness with qualities that later
gained such notoriety in ''The Americans'': a ripping, compassionate
regard for suffering; a moody frontalness and shy probing; wobbly
compositions; and Frank's constant refusal of canned, self-indulgent
feeling. This is an old, or I should say, a very young Robert Frank
who is now news to us all.
W.S. Di Piero has written extensively about modern art and is the
author, mostly recently, of the poetry collection ''Skirts and
Slacks.''
Darin Boville
Did I just read somewhere that SK liked "The Americans" very much?
Perhaps some of the folks here with Kubrick archives on their PCs can
do a keyword search and find the actual reference. Franks' new work,
by the way, is very different then this work (good for him).
--Darin
Darin Boville
Fine Art Photography and Video
www.darinboville.com
Greg Simmons
> Perhaps some of the folks here with Kubrick archives on their PCs can
> do a keyword search and find the actual reference. Franks' new work,
> by the way, is very different then this work (good for him).
>
> --Darin
>
> Darin Boville
> Fine Art Photography and Video
> www.darinboville.com
Speaking of Frank's other work there's a great cinema verite documentary of
the Rolling Stone's 1972 tour. The name eludes me right now ;-) but it's
great if you can see it. Makes you think there might be an alt.movies.frank
if he'd pursued a film career.