Welsh miners, Robert Frank, 1948 First published online February 19, 2009
“Never before have I experienced so much in one week as here. I feel as if I’m in a film...This is really a free country, there’s only one thing you should not do, criticize anything,” Robert Frank wrote to his parents in Switzerland after his first week in New York City, 1947.
Frank became quickly acquainted with a group of artists who would go on to determine the face of American art for decades to come: painters Kline, de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko; photographers Richard Avedon, Russian photography teacher Alexey Brodovitch; poets and writers John Ashbery, Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Frank O’Hara.
Brodovitch encouraged Frank to use a 35mm Leica instead of his more cumbersome, less fluid medium format Rolleiflex. Frank was also persuaded to discard his more methodical Swiss approach to photography, and instead learn a more risk-taking American way.
These artists and writers embraced “the same romantic, almost heroic conviction in the redemptive quality of art, committed to breaking with the traditions of the past, celebrating art that was full of risk and highly expressive of personal experience,” Sarah Greenough wrote in her hefty, Looking In Robert Frank’s The Americans.
By 1947 Frank discovered Bill Brandt, a British documentary photographer expert at infusing his images with “loneliness..and images that showed Britain as a gloomy, class-bound society,” Greenough writes. What most impressed Frank about Brandt was the way he infused seemingly documentary photographs with mystery.
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Train leaving Newcastle 1930s photo Bill Brandt
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| Misty Evening in Sheffield 1930s photos Bill Brandt |
Frank knew he wanted to create picture stories in the style of Life magazine. So he set out to try his hand by leaving fashion photography in New York in June 1948 to travel for 6 months in France, London, Wales, Italy, Switzerland, Cuba, Panama, Peru and Bolivia.
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| London 1951 photo by Robert Frank |
The closest Frank ever got to
being published in Life was
coming in second place in a 1951
Life magazine’s Contest for Young Photographers. His work appeared
November 26th. Although he submitted
several photo essays to Life, including
his fine work of Welsh miners, Life
magazine said no. Later, even after an extraordinary letter of endorsement from
his friend/mentor, Walker Evans didn’t
inspire Life to bite.
During this period, after 10 years studying and practicing photography, I contend Robert Frank captured his finest work.
The whole center of the image is filled with the man facing the camera. He is bathed in a glorious shaft of sunlight, a serape draped around his chest and he has an ecstatic smile, full of hope, optimism and the élan of youth. The landscape is treeless, hard-looking, the dirt road winding ahead, into the middle distance. The center figure is living in a hard land yet he has such delight, such free-spirited wonder. It’s unlike any other Frank photograph, except maybe the one of his first wife Mary, called, My Family/New York City 1951, nursing their infant son with two cats. This was before his book's success and the later tragedy befalling his family. First there was his divorce from his first wife then the death of his daughter and the diagnosis of his son with schizophrenia and early death.
Most of the other photographs Frank took during this intermediate period between student and famous photographer have a classic documentary style, capturing old Europe, Central and South America. One, called Dead Horse/Angers 1949 is quite possibly the most brutal image of a horse in existence, strung up like a dead rabbit, in an abattoir.
Wales, Ben James and His Wife, 1953 is a testimony to that odd moment when extreme contrast is a wondrous thing. The mining couple’s small humble dining room almost glows from the light filtering in through the window. The window, the tablecloth, the curved back of the miner on the floor, immersed in a large galvanized tub of murky water, scrubbing off coal dust, brings home the job of a miner more intensely than a dark candlelit pit.
These photographs were done during documentary photography's noble period. Frank captures the world of his subjects with great empathy, specially in Wales and South America. These are the photos for which Edward Steichen said, “Frank demonstrated that he was more than capable of getting life and infusing the feel and atmosphere of subjects into his photographs.” Steichen advised Frank to seek to penetrate deeper and closer into our brothers.
Influenced by Steichen and the 1939 novel How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn. Frank went to Caerau, a mining village in Wales in March 1953 where he spent several days photographing Ben James and his life as a miner. This in-depth method of a photographer immersion into the lives of subjects is a long-established one. Some of Walker Evans best photographs of the Great Depression resulted from his summer spent with three families, along with writer James Agee, in 1936 in Hale County, Alabama. Likewise W. Eugene Smith spent time in Minimata, Japan, poignantly documenting mercury poisoning of the fishermen in that village.
After Frank's intense period working as a documentary photographer in Europe and the Americas, he returned to New York City in 1953. He was particularly frustrated when Life magazine wouldn’t publish his photos. It was during this time he strengthened his relationships with the Abstract Expressionists painters and the Beat poets, which also contributed to his developing philosophy that art ‘was an expression of experience, not of fact.’ There is no reality except action, they declared, in the spirit of existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. “Feeling is what I like in art,” Kerouac said, “not craftiness and the hiding of feelings.”
Frank’s most helpful supporters at this time were Edward Steichen and Walker Evans. Both believed him a capable photographer. Evans went so far as to almost write Frank’s Guggenheim grant proposal, complete with how Frank should go about photographing The Americans. Needless to say Evans helped Frank propose a classic documentary photographer’s methodology, using an anthropologist-sociologist approach to study our civilization.’
Frank applied for a Guggenheim fellowship to fund his road trip across America for several years, to produce a series of photographs capturing, along with Evans suggestions, ‘the impact of industrialization on people and families and the strong influence of women on all levels such as I have never seen in Europe.’ Frank got the fellowship.
After finishing photographing The Americans--all 764 rolls of film, 10,000 images--he said, “Black and white is the vision of Hope and despair. That is what I want in my photographs.”
I do not like Frank's The Americans. There may be three people in all his images that are halfway appealing. Even the children look sad or sinister. Frank’s dominant feeling looks like anger. Or disdain. Living in England for a time in the 1970s I felt that European scorn for the land of the Philistines. What’s different about the reaction to The Americans is, for the first time, we Americans began to think this way too.
There is one image, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1955 that reminds me of what real life was like at that time. It’s of a black woman sitting on a wooden chair in a field of wildflowers. A telephone pole is just right of center looking like a cross. The woman is dressed in a ruffle trimmed skirt, she is comfortably draped over the chair, leaning back, smiling. It looks like sundown. There is no pretense, no axe to grind, no political cynicism. Just her and me, the viewer. Walker Evans photographed Beaufort in the 1930s and told Frank to go there. Frank was wise to listen to him.
Most of these photos are like watching a flat-character-ed old cowboy and Indian movie. There’s no bead work, or wild rice, or myths. Just the bizarre battle scenes of whoops and flailing tomahawks. Frank failed to capture the other half of the story of us Americans. His vision is of a mood, not in his subjects, who are too self-absorbed to be aware of moods, or of a country. Frank’s brewing mood is a philosophical paradigm shift into cynicism, defiance, a Balkanization of classes, of vapidness taking hold in politics, entertainment, all, tragically, determining how we see ourselves. It’s hard to achieve great things when we despise ourselves specially when we base our suppositions on a criteria other groups aren’t expected to match.
Frank has no photos of gardens, or quilts, or the inside of spirited homes, of families eating together or washing, or attending church. Maybe he thought those things sentimental. His Americans mainly live outdoors, or at gambling tables, or standing alone next to glowing juteboxes. Cars are the most constant fixture, that and vacuous or suspicious faces. How did these photos garner such power? Fifty years on, we’re still looking at this flat view of ourselves.
Bibliography:
-Aperture Master’s of Photography Henri Cartier-Bresson (Aperture Foundation, New York 1976)
-Bourcier, Noel, Andre Kertesz ( Phaidon Press Ltd., London 2001)
-Buell, Hal, Moments The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs (Black Dog & -Leventhal Publishers New York 1999)
-de Tocqueville, Alexis Democracy in America (1835)
-Frank, Robert, The Americans (SCALO Publishers New York-Zurich-Berlin 1958)
-Greenough, Sarah, Looking In Robert Frank’s The Americans (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 2009)
-Greenough, Sarah & Brookman, Philip, Robert Frank Moving Out (National
Gallery of Art, Washington DC 1994)
-Life Magazine, The Country Doctor (Time, Inc., New York 1948)
-Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower (Alfred A. Knopf New York, 2006)
