Robert Frank was a Swiss-American photographer of remarkable range and depth. Born in Zurich, Switzerland, to a Jewish family, he and other members of his family were able to survive Nazi rule by staying in Switzerland, a neutral territory. In 1947, Frank moved to America, where he worked, at first, as a fashion photographer. But he gave that up for free-lancing; his pictures, regularly melancholic in nature, read as a trenchant social commentary, being both an indication of the photographer’s inner nature, and the complex, often raw nature of American life. Frank’s seminal book, The Americans, first came out in France in 1957; it then was printed in America in 1959. The book made a sensational impact on the intellectual life of the time; while it was criticized for its dark rendering of the American spirit, many found its close attention to the tacit violence of the culture powerful, even compelling. Frank, always a man devoted to the portrayal of public idiosyncrasy, that is, the psychic violence of power, saw in America a realism, uninformed by the imagination, that bordered on the reactionary. Published a few short years before the massive social changes of the Sixties, the book served as an intellectual precedent for the provocation of deep-seated social change.
The twenty years covered in this show, which exists only online, record a period of immense dissatisfaction with culture as it then existed. Frank’s eye, predisposed to visionary report, as well as demonstrating a genuine concern for the dispossessed, became increasingly a critique of the spirit of the time. Frank thus effortlessly recorded social discomfort.
Because Frank’s art made him a social celebrity as much as he was a gifted artist, we pass over rather quickly the artist’s command regarding the overall composition, matters of tonal qualities, such as compositional balance, the use of lights and darks in the photo’s tonal expressiveness, and the hard-to-define notion of emotional presence beyond the actual image itself.
Actually, this last quality tended to merge with Frank’s mythic energies, which played out as elegies for individuals and for larger circumstances or groups of people. The big picture, as record and judgment, is finally the focus of Frank’s art, which addresses social inadequacies as they are understood in marginalized people.
One might argue that Frank’s interests are mostly psychological, but such a view does not do justice to the vivid social and political commentary inherent in the work. There is too much dissonance in Frank’s art for it to be merely a record of personal difficulty alone. Instead, Frank is unerring in his perception of America as darker than we would like to imagine. But America has always been beset by the need to evade the storm clouds attending to private and public efforts. In Frank’s works, there is no mistaking the Thanatos surrounding us. Whether the critique Implied by the artist’s darker focus is economically driven or a consequence of emotional indifference lacks an answer. It is likely a tie too hard to bring about. But intuitively it can be said that the malaise hanging like a fog over Frank’s oeuvre surely has a reason behind it—a reason notable for its connectedness to the harsh, close to violent character of American life. These limitations, both in the moment and in the long run, have to do with social structures more than psychological decline. As for the pictures themselves, they communicate both mystery and menace in equal measure. A good number of the images taken in 1948 describe conditions or people in London or Paris. But the American images always seem suffused with violence. There is a powerful image of black persons in an open convertible. The 1955 image, called Belle Isle, shows six black people, young and old, in the car. Two adults sit in the front. In the back, there is one youth, without a shirt, and three younger kids, who gaze without focus into empty space.
Belle Isle is a long-established place of entertainment 945 acres in size. It has been taken over by the federal government, and contains a good size woodland, where small animals thrive. But our knowledge of an idyllic oasis in the middle of a major city is offset by Detroit’s poverty, which affects many in the large black community in the city. The photo, then, is a complex comment in the sense that the car is an upscale convertible indicating affluence, while the black faces underscore the continuing struggle of racism, especially at that time.
The striking 1951 photo of two British gentleman, formally dressed in topcoats and perfectly knotted ties, shows Frank’s extraordinary capacity for understanding people from cultures other than his own. The stiff self-presentation of the two men, one in a charcoal topcoat, the other in a black coat, says a lot about the British stiff upper lip. Both men wear bowlers, quintessentially British hats. The man on the right has a handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket of his coat. This item is inevitably accompanied by the ubiquitous rolled umbrella. On the left side of the street the gentlemen frequented by their stroll to work, a line of tightly parked cars occurs.
The background of the photo is strange—a kind of gray/brown, more or less palpable mist that places the composition in an unexplained context, a mystery. Frank accurately captures the spirit of British culture, ifs formal disposition.
Frank’s great strength lies with his tacit ability to recognize difference—among people, among cultures. But he is also a terrific formal artist; there is another work called London, made in 1951, that occurs in silhouette: a man in a topcoat striding toward a beautiful tree with long horizontal branches supporting foliage. The tree, surrounded by a next-to-useless single-wire fence, is a magnificent sign of natural beauty, while the man, in formal attire and striding purposefully forward, offers the advantages of culture as opposed to those of nature. A mesmerizing image, the composition deals with formalities in an unforgettable manner.
Peru (1948) is a stunning image of man in black striding through a series of low mounds with ridges closely following each other. It looks very much like a figure making his way through an earthen sea. As happens so often in these works a feeling of imminent apocalypse hovers over the image.
There is a marvelous photo taken in Paris in 1939, of a man in a black suit, holding an umbrella in the middle f a gravel-strewn urban park with slatted folding chairs placed randomly across the expanse of part. A study of sharply declared light and dark tonalities, the image captures the isolation of a single person in the midst of urban emptiness, emphasized by the awareness of war soon to come. This work, like most of Frank’s art, is both a very strong formal statement given complexity by social awareness. We never escape Frank’s decisive commentary on contemporary life.
We cannot call Frank a surrealist, but there is a consistent display of sd unusual in his art. Frank’s online images, in this very strong show on the centenary of his birth, advances a way of seeing that finds the unusual in the everyday. The artist’s gifts are such that his moments, recorded permanently and with originality in the extreme, become readings of America and other cultures in more than memorable ways. We were fortunate to have an observer of such significance.
https://www.danzigergallery.com/exhibitions/20-photographs-from-1948-1968
