Robert Frank

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Lore & Background

Robert Frank was born in Zürich, Switzerland, the son of Rosa (Zucker) and Hermann Frank. His family was Jewish. According to Frank, his mother Rosa had a Swiss passport, while his father Hermann, originating from Frankfurt, Germany, had become stateless after losing his German citizenship as a Jew. They had to apply for the Swiss citizenship of Robert and his older brother, Manfred. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression. He turned to photography, in part as a means to escape the confines of his business-oriented family and home, and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before he created his first hand-made book of photographs, '40 Fotos,' in 1946. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar. In 1949, the new editor of Camera magazine, Walter Laubli, published a substantial portfolio of Jakob Tuggener pictures alongside the work of the 25 year-old Frank who had just returned to his native Switzerland after two years abroad, with pages including some of his first pictures from New York. Tuggener was a role model for the younger artist, first mentioned to him by Frank's boss and mentor, Zurich commercial photographer Michael Wolgensinger. Tuggener's book 'Fabrik' was a model for Frank's 'Les Américains (The Americans)' published ten years later in Paris by Delpire, in 1958. Frank soon left to travel in South America and Europe. He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru, and returned to the U.S. in 1950. That year, after meeting Edward Steichen, he participated in the group show '51 American Photographers' at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); he also married fellow artist Mary Frank (née Lockspeiser), with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo. Though he was initially optimistic about the United States' society and culture, Frank's perspective quickly changed as he confronted the fast pace of American life and what he saw as an overemphasis on money. He now saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a perspective that became evident in his later photography. Associating with other contemporary photographers such as Saul Leiter and Diane Arbus, he helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 1950s.

Reader's Guide

Robert Frank's significance rests primarily on his 1958 book 'The Americans,' which fundamentally changed the nature of photography. Inspired by fellow Swiss Jakob Tuggener's 1943 filmic book 'Fabrik,' Bill Brandt's 'The English at Home' (1936), and Walker Evans's 'American Photographs' (1938), and on the recommendation of Evans, Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Leiberman, Edward Steichen, and Meyer Schapiro, Frank secured a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph all strata of its society. 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 along with him for part of his series of road trips over the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 shots. 83 of these were selected by him for publication in 'The Americans.' Frank's journey was not without incident. He later recalled the anti-Semitism to which he was subject in a small Arkansas town: 'I remember the guy [policeman] took me into the police station, and he sat there and put his feet on the table. It came out that I was Jewish because I had a letter from the Guggenheim Foundation. They really were primitive.' He was told by the sheriff, 'Well, we have to get somebody who speaks Yiddish.' ... 'They wanted to make a thing out of it. It was the only time it happened on the trip. They put me in jail. It was scary. Nobody knew where I was.' Elsewhere in the South, he was told by a sheriff that he had 'an hour to leave town.' Those incidents may have contributed to the dark view of America found in the work. Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Frank met Beat writer Jack Kerouac, who eventually contributed the introduction to the U.S. edition of 'The Americans.' Frank also became lifelong friends with Allen Ginsberg, and was one of the main visual artists to document the Beat subculture. The irony that Frank found in the gloss of American culture and wealth over tension gave his photographs a clear contrast to those of most contemporary American photojournalists, as did his use of unusual focus, low lighting and cropping that deviated from accepted photographic techniques. 'Les Américains' was first published in 1958 by Robert Delpire in Paris, as part of its Encyclopédie Essentielle series, with texts by Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck. It was finally published in 1959 in the United States, without the texts, by Grove Press, where it initially received substantial criticism. 'Popular Photography' derided his images as 'meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.' Over time and through its inspiration of later artists, 'The Americans' became a seminal work. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in 'The Guardian' in 2014, said it '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 expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

Did You Know?

• Frank took 28,000 shots during his Guggenheim Fellowship road trips across the U.S., from which he selected 83 for 'The Americans.'
• He was jailed in a small Arkansas town after a policeman discovered he was Jewish through a letter from the Guggenheim Foundation.
• Frank's first hand-made book of photographs, '40 Fotos,' was created in 1946, before he emigrated to the U.S.
• The U.S. edition of 'The Americans' included an introduction by Beat writer Jack Kerouac.
• Frank's contributions to the 1955 'Family of Man' exhibition included seven photographs, many more than most other contributors.