SPEAKING FRANKLY
— "It was just pure feeling that I expressed visually."
Five decades after the publication of The Americans in1959, the iconic stature of this modern classic and its maker, Robert Frank, endures. So completely did he change the course of modern photography that the designations “before Frank” and “after Frank” are commonplace in describing photography’s timeline, while the canon of materials devoted to Frank and his works grows steadily. But never until now has Frank allowed, and participated in, so complete an investigation into his masterpiece as Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” organized by the National Gallery of Art. This unparalleled exhibition opened in Washington D.C. in January— just in time for inaugural crowds—traveled west to the San Francisco Museum of Art, and is now in its third and final stop, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Surprisingly, this is the first time all 83 photographs from The Americans have appeared in a museum setting in New York City. Oh, but look out now, this road show contains so much more. In his remarks during the September press preview at the Met, Jeff L. Rosenheim (below), Met curator, department of photographs, described The Americans as “A book that’s been hallowed but not well revealed.” Looking In is the antidote: the heart and soul of the exhibition are the 83 framed photographs, lush gelatin silver prints, including rarely-seen vintage images printed by Frank, and often signed. Enriching the experience of viewing these images are archival materials, many on loan from some thirty institutions, galleries and private individuals, including Frank. His donations of archival materials related to The Americans, in addition to his gifts of photographs and other exhibition prints to the National Gallery of Art in 1990, 1994, and 1996, formed the foundation of the project. Both Frank and his wife June Leaf are acknowledged in particular “for their enthusiastic participation in all aspects of this exhibition and its equally ambitious catalogue.” In all, Looking In presents approximately 150 photographs, 17 books, 15 manuscripts, 22 contact sheets, and more, along with a new film Frank created in honor of the exhibition. At each host venue, a variety of related public activities has taken place, while galleries including Pace/MacGill and Robert Mann in New York City have also mounted Robert Frank shows, featuring works from The Americans along with earlier and later work. The Met proclaims the show’s importance with a large vertical black-and-white banner prominently hanging on the Fifth Avenue edifice, in the company of banners for the shows of Vermeer and Watteau. As if that weren’t enough to make every New Yorker proud, in the 2009 Annual Lucie Awards ceremony at Lincoln Center in New York on October 19, the distinguished Lucie Award for Curator/Exhibition of the Year went to Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, for Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans. It’s fitting that the show should come to rest in New York City, Frank’s home base since his arrival as a Swiss émigré in 1947. During a public “Conversation” with Greenhough at the National Gallery in April, Frank noted: “I arrived in NY in 1947 and my second education began.” In 1950 he married a young painter, Mary Lockspeiser, and they had two children, Pablo and Andrea; “and by then we were friends with a lot of painters and especially a group called the Beats. (Gregory) Corso, poets, Kerouac, and other writers influenced me in another lifestyle, freer and for me courageous. . . I believed with my work I would persevere and do what I could little by little . . . and then I started to believe in it.”
With New York City and his friends as Muse, Frank reached the top with his personal work, and he often acknowledges his kinship with the city. In opening remarks of the “Conversation” at the Met in October, Frank said, “I’m very happy this happens in New York—this is my city. I like New York and I like to live here and I hope it will go on for a while, living here.” And what lies ahead? During the Washington “Conversation” Frank expressed gratitude for many things: “I feel that I’m lucky to reach the age I’ve reached, I’m lucky I can keep on working, I have people who will help me.” Born in 1924, Frank celebrates his 85th birthday in November. On the rare occasions when Frank appears in public, people turn out in droves. I was at the press previews at both the National Gallery and the Met (Frank was not), as well as among the 842 fortunate individuals (including the seldom-seen Josef Koudelka) seated before Frank, Greenhough and Rosenheim for their sold-out “Conversation” at the Met. Be advised: in the first two weeks of the New York show, it attracted 29,000 visitors. Don’t wait until last-minute to make your pilgrimage. This special exhibition closes January 3, 2010 and travels no more. Looking In: Highlights & Reflections These, along with other Frank material, the companion catalog to the show, and even plastic cameras (Frank is considered a pioneer of "the snapshot aesthetic") are available at the onsite bookshop and also from the Met online bookstore. Topping the list for any photographer’s library: • The Americans 50th anniversary edition (Steidl 2008) (winner of the 2008 Lucie Award for Book of the Year). Over the years, The Americans has been printed by different publishers in multiple languages and formats, some approved by Frank, some not. But this edition is superb: the 83 photographs were scanned in tritone from vintage prints in Frank’s collection. Moreover, Frank was involved in every step of design and production: re-cropping to full size those photographs that had been cropped in earlier editions, revising the book design, selecting the paper, conceiving a new dust jacket, and overseeing the printing, right down to inspecting and approving each sheet at Steidl’s press in Gottingen.
• Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (National Gallery of Art / Steidl, 2009. Edited by Sarah Greenhough.) The companion catalog to the exhibit. “Catalog” is hardly sufficient to describe this hefty, scholarly, and exquisitely fashioned volume, available in two editions: a 374-page softbound one with essays and plates and a hefty 505-page expanded hardbound edition that, as Rosenheim quipped at the press preview, “May be the last great gasp in a photography book of this sort.” Its weight alone will make some gasp. In addition to the essays and plates, the expanded edition features contact sheets, archival materials, a map and chronology, and analysis of the preliminary sequencing and later editions of The Americans. Generously, Frank allowed inclusion of all 81 annotated full-page contact sheets that contain the 83 photographs comprising The Americans. In revealing Frank’s shooting method and visual syntax, these contacts are like a photographic Rosetta Stone, certain to open new pathways into the book. By themselves, the contacts, published with just a few attendant materials in an abbreviated special edition, would make an ideal educational and teaching resource, perhaps along with a handbook for teachers. More Robert Frank books and material are forthcoming in 2010 through Steidl’s “The Robert Frank Project.” This long-term publishing program encompasses Frank’s complete oeuvre, including his classic books, reprints of less well known small books, the publication of previously unseen projects, newly-conceived book works, and his "Complete Film Works" in specially designed collector’s DVD sets, all in a scheme and to a standard Frank has overseen.
Looking In spreads out comfortably over several galleries (the same space that once held Walker Evans’s photographs from American Photographs). The first gallery holds many of the rare archival materials providing historical context for The Americans. Here you’ll find books from Frank’s library, those of Swiss photographers Gotthard Schuh and Jakob Tuggener; along with books by Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Alexey Brodovich and others, documents related to Frank’s application to the Guggenheim in 1954, his letters from the road, the original book maquette and the first draft of Jack Kerouac’s introduction to The Americans. The 83 photographs hang in the adjacent three galleries, while glass cases hold more fascinating materials, including blown-up versions of some of Frank’s annotated contacts, and original copies of the both Les Americans (Paris, Robert Delpire publisher, 1958) and The Americans (New York, Grove Press, Barney Rosset publisher,1959 – though the book did not actually appear until 1960. Mary’s Book (1949) Guggenheim Fellowship In one especially diplomatic revision Evans wrote, “Incidentally, it is fair to assume that when an observant American travels abroad his eye will see freshly, and that the reverse may be true, when a European eye looks at the United States.” Evans’s version of the application was submitted and in 1955 Frank received his Guggenheim and was soon on his way. Imagine the outcome if Frank had actually submitted the application in his own words. Years later he said of the book: The Americans is the voyage of a European in a country that he crosses for the first time. You are on a beach, you dive into a wave.”
On the road to a book The maquette has 92 images, presented as photostats but in a format that conforms to that of The Americans published by Grove Press in 1959: one photograph per spread on a right-hand page, with a small title on the left-hand page. It’s refreshing, if not humbling, to see what came of Frank’s modest presentation, though even then, without his vision, intent, and a roll-up-your-sleeves commitment, The Americans would never have come into being. Frank’s ability, unconventional style, sensibility, and potential had attracted as admirers and supporters not only Evans but the legendary Edward Steichen—then in his seventies and at the Museum of Modern Art—and the inspirational art director Alexi Brodovich, who had hired Frank at Harper’s Bazaar in 1947, opening the doors of the commercial world of fashion to him—which Frank abruptly left to travel and photograph in Peru. Throughout Frank’s career, this would be his modus operandi: When the pursuit of art and truth collided with the constraints of commerce, Frank chose art. A singular man In a note Evans wrote on Frank’s behalf to a member of the Guggenheim committee, he extolled Frank as “an extremely serious (not solemn) worker of impressive depth of mind. The chief gift I speak of is imagination, and it is backed by the gift, or curse, of sensitivity. And rare is the man working in photography who is thus equipped.” Rosenheim includes this letter in his essay “Robert Frank and Walker Evans” (Looking In, p.148). It’s another example of the illuminating materials interwoven within each of the carefully focused essays, by authors Stuart Alexander, Philip Brookman, Michael Frizot, Martin Gasser, Sarah Greenhough, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Luc Sante, and Anne Wilkes Tucker. “I wouldn’t go back” Frank: At the time you select—that selection I made was very important—all the energy went into that. That had to do. I wouldn’t go back once I made the choice. I changed maybe one or two but I wouldn’t go back. Exhibition goers can get an idea of what editing was like by poring over the large selection of Frank’s original 1956 work prints. These cover an entire wall in the first gallery. Frank created the assemblage in 2008 just for the show.
Publication For the American version, Frank’s wishes prevailed. He told this little story during the Washington “Conversation”: “I had a friend, Barney Rosset, of Grove Press/Evergreen Review. He published good writers like Burroughs and Kerouac. First he wanted poetry on each page. I said, ‘That’s not the way it should be.’” This time Frank held firm. And though he had asked Walker Evans to write an introduction, he declined to use it, “for it was on a different level.” He showed his photographs to Jack Kerouac, asked if he would write about them, and he agreed. The rest is history. Though some critics reviled the book, many embraced it, and when American society erupted in the 1960’s in social and political unrest, The Americans became recognized as not only revolutionary but prescient. The 1969 revised edition from Aperture included on the back cover a long quote from John Szarkowski, then Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In speaking of the difference ten years can make, he writes: “It is difficult to remember now how shocking Robert Frank’s book was ten years ago. The pictures took us by ambush then. We knew the America that they described of course, but we knew it as one knows the background hum in a record player, not as a fact to recognize and confront. Nor had we understood that this stratum of our experience was a proper concern of artists.” From Szarkowski’s viewpoint a decade later, he would now state that Frank had “established a new iconography for contemporary America, comprised of bits of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces.” He added, “This iconography has become a common coin, used now perhaps too easily as a substitute for observation, But here in the original the acuity of Frank’s own sensibility is alive and relevant.” Praise yes, but far more restrained than the general accolades from Frank’s ever-expanding following then and now. Joel Sternfeld, for example, writes about The Americans’ impact on him when he was becoming a photographer in the late 60’s: “I would look at it before I went to sleep and in the morning I would reach for it like a smoker reaches for a cigarette. I needed to see it again” (quoted in the Steidl brochure, “Robert Frank,” 2009)  Movie Premiere, Hollywood, 1955. ©Robert Frank from The Americans Note: "In Movie premiere—Hollywood Frank focused his lens on the fans in the background, not the star in the foreground, setting up a complex voyeuristic dialogue between the photographer, the crowd, the star, and the viewers. As we gaze at the fans, who stare at the star, who in turn glances in our direction, the self-perpetuating nature of the scene becomes clear." (Checklist & Labels, Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans") 83 photographs
In the next three galleries, the 83 photographs from The Americans are hung in the sequence Frank created for the book, which is neither chronologically nor geographically organized. Frank conceived of the book as having four parts (photographs of flags are part of what set them apart) though divisions are not stated. Rather, they arise from careful sequencing of images and linking them thematically, conceptually, formally in a poetic, intuitive flow. Wandering among the actual works can be mesmerizing: each one beckons stay, come deeper, look again. As many times as I have gone through the book or seen the pictures on exhibition, I inevitably come across an image as if for the very first time, even though I know I must have seen it before. That’s just one of the wonders of a book conceived on the non-literal level, whose every image is open to new interpretations and being experienced anew. Again, Kerouac nailed it: “What a poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every gray mysterious detail.” Two “last” photographs "Store window- Washington DC," is positioned as the second photograph in the final section of The Americans. The section opener, "Political rally, Chicago, 1956" (top, below, Americans 58) shows a man half-obscured by the tuba he is playing, flanked by partial views of people and flags. It's an image well-suited to the pumped-up political atmosphere of pre-inaugural Washington DC in January 2009 (bottom, below). Fittingly, the National Gallery of Art selected it as the key image for its press materials.
The wall notes describe this section: "The fourth and final section of The Americans is the largest, the most brutal, and the most hopeful. The opening suite of twelve photographs presents a stunning critique of the country. It implies that the American political system drowns out the voices of its average citizens; that Americans worship false icons such as cowboys and movie stars; that Americans’ work is restrictive and unsatisfactory; and that America’s rich are arrogant, its poor are meek, and its middle class is lulled into quiet submission by a consumer culture." (Checklist & Labels, Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans") The book’s final image (below, Americans 83), “U.S. 90 en route to Del Rio, Texas, 1955,” shows a car pulled off the road, with a woman inside holding a baby. The father is not to be seen because he was the man taking the picture. Frank made this photograph—of his wife Mary holding Pablo— during one of the times they had joined him on the road. It was far from the last photograph he would make. A renewal of his original fellowship helped see him from May 1956 to May 1957, though money was ever scarce, even then. To supplement the family income Frank took on commercial assignments whenever he could find them.
Two on one: never again Bookends “I am always looking outside The same words are printed as wall text in the exhibit’s first gallery. They bookend the exhibition.
Moving On Driven by personal passion rather than by a lust for position, power, fame, or monetary success, Frank keeps moving on, creating one unexpected work after another, all centering on the visual image. Out there on his own for the long haul, Robert Frank continues to inspire all who would soar or plummet, not on borrowed wings, but on their own, far beyond words and explanation. ________ Mary Ann Lynch is a New-York based writer, photographer, and curator. Her articles on popular culture and the arts have been widely published in magazines and journals including CameraArts, Imago, Shots, the Honolulu Advertiser, National Geographic New York and elsewhere. Her articles on photography can now also be found in Black & White Magazine and are soon to appear in Color Magazine. Lynch is a regular contributor to Red Dog Journal. Click here to send her a note. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (www.metmuseum.org) Robert Mann Gallery: (www.robertmanngallery.com)
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