Robert Frank: Photographer who dissected American dream 1924-2019
● Robert Frank, who has died at 94, was one of the great photographers of the 20th century, his depictions of street life eschewing the niceties of formal composition and raising the snapshot to the status of high art; he also worked with the Rolling Stones on a documentary that lifted the lid on life on the road, and made Pull My Daisy, a film about the Beat generation.
His masterwork was The Americans, an 83shot collection taken on a road trip across the US between 1955 and 1957. It was funded by a Guggenheim grant, and in his application he had stated his purpose: “To portray Americans as they live at present. Their every day and their Sunday, their realism and dream. The look of their cities, towns and highways.”
It stood in stark contrast to the American dream of the ’50s, revealing a country riven by poverty and division; its portrayals of funerals, drive-ins, segregated trolley cars, jukeboxes, churches, bikers and diners did not so much glorify the US as dissect it.
In the foreword, his friend Jack Kerouac wrote of “The humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness of these pictures!” But it was widely perceived as being anti-American, and was condemned by such magazines as Popular Photography for its “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures”. It sold only 600 copies of its first edition but its reputation grew steadily, and it is now widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s most important and influential photographic books.
Frank’s first filmmaking effort was Pull My Daisy (1959), made with the abstract expressionist Alfred Leslie. With a script loosely based by Kerouac on his play The Beat Generation, it featured the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and told the tale of a woman who invites a bishop to dinner, which is then taken over by her husband’s Bohemian friends. It has been praised as an improvisational masterpiece and remains a defining document of the Beat generation.
Frank was born into a Jewish family in Zurich. Though the family was safely ensconced in Switzerland during World War 2, with the Nazis not far away young Robert developed a keen understanding of oppression.
He was apprenticed to various photographers, beginning in 1941. Railing against his family’s materialism, in 1947 he sailed to New York and began to make his way in the fashion world, shooting for the likes of Harper’s Bazaar and befriending Ginsberg and the artist Willem de Kooning.
Films, though, began to take up more of his time, and in 1972 the Rolling Stones enlisted Frank to document their US tour that year.
“Warts and all” does not quite cover the resulting Cocksucker Blues, with its scenes of drug-taking (including a groupie mainlining heroin in a hotel room, Keith Richards being injected and Mick Jagger snorting cocaine backstage), as well as a couple joining the mile-high club.
Jagger told Frank: “It’s a f***ing good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again.” The band refused to release it. Frank became increasingly reclusive — a 2008 Vanity Fair profile noted: “He has by turns been described by people who do not know him as ornery, reclusive, hard, manipulative to the point of destructive, and cold as a bowling ball.”
Frank is survived by his second wife, the sculptor June Leaf.
London