Robert Frank: American visions - photographer and filmmaker - Interview

Art in America, March, 1996 by Brian Wallis

Over the past 20 years, photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank has been something of a recluse, a sort of art-world J.D. Salinger, avoiding the public and generally declining requests for interviews. Dividing his time between his old loft on Bleecker Street in Manhattan and a former fisherman's shack on the coast of Nova Scotia, Frank has deliberately eschewed the trappings of celebrity in recent years despite growing acclaim for his work as a photographer--or perhaps because of it. In 1989 he became so fed up with the commercialization of the photography market that he nailed a stack of his rare vintage photographs to a board, tied it up with baling wire, and called that his art work. Such acts of defiance have only added to the legend of Frank's irascibility and desire to be left alone.

As a result, Frank's retrospective of photographs, films and videos, organized by the National Gallery in Washington, recently at the Whitney Museum in New York (and now at the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles through May 19), has been greeted with more than the normal degree of interest. In a cover story at the time of the Washington opening, the New York Times Magazine proclaimed "A Lost Master Returns." Ironically, that is just the sort of fawning hyperbole that Frank sought so hard to avoid in the first place. And, as the exhibition clearly demonstrates, Frank never really went away--though the metaphors of travel, flight and questing remain central to his life and work.

After emigrating from Switzerland in 1947, Frank achieved almost immediate success as a commercial photographer in New York. Although he was just 22, Frank garnered prominent assignments from the legendary Alexey Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar. But Frank was frustrated with New York, and set out to explore Paris, London, Wales, Spain, Italy and Peru over the next four years. One of the great revelations of the National Gallery exhibition is the large but little-known body of extremely poetic photographs that Frank took during these years, especially the book of tiny photographs of Paris that he made for his future wife, Mary Lockspeiser, in 1949.

Of course, Frank is best known for his book The Americans, which he began compiling in 1954. With encouragement from his mentor, photographer Walker Evans, and a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, Frank traveled by car to several parts of the United States over the next three years, recording average Americans in offices, juke joints and roadside diners. Despite its poignancy and sheer physical sweep, The Americans was deeply disturbing to many viewers when it was published in the U.S. in 1959. No one was quite prepared for Frank's harsh view of the alienation and ennui of postwar America or for the jagged and grainy style of his black-and-white photographs. The hostile reception of The Americans helped propel Frank away from still photography toward even more subjective filmmaking and video.

Perhaps because The Americans so dominates our conception of Frank's work, it is sometimes difficult to understand or appreciate his subsequent output. Frank not only turned away from photography but increasingly embraced an intense, searching, even melancholic self-scrutiny couched in the form of fictional or semi-documentary narrative films. After the critical success of his first film, Pull My Daisy (made with Alfred Leslie in 1959, with narration by Jack Kerouac), Frank made five more films in the 1960s, including the feature-length Me and My Brother (1968) and the autobiographical Conversation in Vermont (1969). His record of a Rolling Stones U.S. tour, Cocksucker Blues (1972), achieved some degree of notoriety when the Stones refused to allow its release because of scenes involving orgies and shooting up. (After years of legal hassles, Frank is now allowed to show the film only occasionally and in the context of his other film work.)

Following the death of his 21-year-old daughter, Andrea, in a plane crash in 1974, Frank became increasingly remote. Some of his grief is recorded in the film Life Dances On (1980) and in the bleak Polaroid photographs that he made throughout the 1970s. In returning to photography Frank literally reinvented his work, producing an extraordinarily rich and highly personal body of images that refer to nature, mortality, time and absence. Many of the large color photographs and collages from this period take a more brutal and highly innovative approach to the photograph as an object; they are cut, pasted, taped, or scratched with words. They are less like photographs than art works, and far less controlled than his earlier black-and-white photography.

In the last decade or so, Frank's production has been fascinatingly eclectic, ranging from a commission to photograph the 1984 Democratic Convention to fashion shoots for Italian designers and shoe manufacturers to a music video for the band New Order. At the same time, Frank became more publicly retrospective, as if tentatively trying to reassess his own life. In 1986 he helped the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston organize the first major survey of his work, and in 1989 he released a revised and expanded version of his classic 1970 book The Lines of My Hand. And while Frank struggled in all these projects to reinvent himself once again, his work has an ever greater effect on each new generation, with Frank-like images turning up throughout the work of younger photographers, in scores of independent films and in every third video on MTV.