Robert Frank

ROBERT FRANK (Zurich 1924 - Nova Scotia 2019) .
"America," c. 1955.
Gelatin silver on paper.
Framed with museum glass.
Signed in ink in the lower corner.
Measurements: 30 x 24 cm; 56 x 52 cm (frame).
The image shows a steam locomotive crossing an elevated bridge over a cobblestone street. In the foreground is an old street lamp and a traffic sign with two discs, probably indicating a prohibition or restriction.
Robert Frank was a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker, who also became a U.S. citizen. His most notable work is the 1958 book The Americans, which earned Frank comparisons to de Tocqueville because his photography provided a fresh and nuanced view of American society from the outside. Critic Sean O'Hagan, wrote in The Guardian in 2014, that The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. It remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later explored other fields such as film and video and experimented with photo manipulation and photomontage.
Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland, into a Jewish family. Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II. He trained with several photographers and graphic designers before creating his first handmade photography book, 40 Photos, in 1946. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947 and got a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar. In 1949, Camera magazine's new editor, Walter Laubli (1902-1991), published a substantial portfolio of Jakob Tuggener's photographs taken at high-class shows and in factories, along with the work of the 25-year-old Frank, who had just returned to his native Switzerland after two years abroad. He soon left for South America and Europe and created another book of handmade photographs he took in Peru. He returned to the United States in 1950 where he met Edward Steichen, and participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Although initially optimistic about American society and culture, Frank's perspective quickly changed when confronted with the fast pace of American life, which he saw as an overemphasis on money. It was then that his images began to show America as an often desolate and lonely place. Frank's own dissatisfaction with the control that editors exerted over his work also undoubtedly influenced his experience. He continued to travel, moving his family briefly to Paris. In 1953, he returned to New York and continued to work as a freelance photojournalist for magazines such as McCall's, Vogue and Fortune. By associating with other contemporary photographers such as Saul Leiter and Diane Arbus, he helped form what Jane Livingston has called the New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 1950s. In 1955, Frank achieved further recognition with Edward Steichen's inclusion of seven of his photographs in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition. In 1955 Frank was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to travel the United States and photograph society. The cities he visited included Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan; Savannah, Georgia; Miami Beach and St. Petersburg, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Reno, Nevada; Salt Lake City, Utah; Butte, Montana; and Chicago, Illinois. He took his family with him for part of his series of road trips over the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 photos of which only 83 were selected by him for publication in The Americans.
He had his first solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago, and a year later exhibited a second time at MoMA. In 1972 the Kunsthaus Zürich held a major retrospective of his work.