AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- The Americans (1958/1959), 83 photographs from a road trip across the United States
- Worked in
- Black and white
- Camera
- Leica 35mm rangefinder
- Also
- Filmmaker, with more than 30 films and videos, including Pull My Daisy (1959); Hasselblad Award (1996)
- Start with
- The Americans (Steidl, 2008)
- Links
Robert Frank (1924–2019) was a Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker who moved to New York in 1947. His book The Americans, made on a Guggenheim-funded road trip in 1955 and 1956, changed how photographers saw everyday life. He later made more than 30 films and videos and kept making personal photobooks until late in life.
The story
In November 1955, a police officer stopped a car near McGehee, a small town in Arkansas. The driver was a young photographer from Switzerland. In his report, Lieutenant R. E. Brown wrote about the man’s shabby look, his foreign accent and the many cameras in the car. Robert Frank spent almost three days in the town jail. Then he was fingerprinted and let go.
He was on the road because of a Guggenheim Fellowship, which Walker Evans had helped him win. In his application, Frank promised an “observation and record of what one naturalised American finds to see in the United States.” He had arrived in New York in 1947, at 23. Looking back, he said: “I knew nothing of the world.”
So he drove and looked. With his wife Mary and their two children, he covered about 10,000 miles and shot 767 rolls of film. In New Orleans that autumn he photographed a passing trolley. White passengers sit at the front. A Black man sits at the back. Curator Sarah Greenough says the contact sheets show he took it “almost out of the corner of his eye.”
The night in jail stayed with him. Speaking at Wellesley College in 1977, he remembered it simply. “It’s pretty scary, and I think that somehow came through in the photographs.”
From about 28,000 pictures he chose 83. The book came out in Paris in 1958 and in New York in 1959, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. “You got eyes,” Kerouac wrote. Many American critics did not agree. They called the pictures blurry and grainy, and the photographer an unpatriotic cynic. Sales were slow. But over time, the book came to be seen as one of the most important in the history of photography.
In Arkansas, the police saw a suspicious stranger with too many cameras. In fact, he was a newcomer looking very closely at his new country. “I wanted to present what I saw, pure and simple,” he said.
The work
- 1924Born in Zurich, Switzerland, on 9 November
- 1947Moves to New York and works for Harper’s Bazaar
- 1953Photographs coal miners in Caerau, Wales
- 1955Wins a Guggenheim Fellowship and sets out across the United States
- 1958Les Américains is published in Paris by Robert Delpire
- 1959The Americans appears in the US; makes the film Pull My Daisy
- 1972Publishes The Lines of My Hand
- 1996Receives the Hasselblad Award
- 2019Dies at his home in Nova Scotia on 9 September, aged 94
Lessons
Write down what you want to see. His Guggenheim application described the project in one clear sentence before he took a single frame of it.
Shoot a lot, choose very little. He shot 767 rolls on the road and kept 83 pictures for the book.
Trust the quick glance. Trolley, New Orleans was made almost out of the corner of his eye, not after a long setup.
Try this: write one sentence about what you want to show of the place where you live. Photograph for a month. Then choose only ten pictures and put them in an order that tells your sentence.
Gear
Leica rangefinder camera: he already used a 35mm Leica in Peru in the late 1940s. The Swiss Camera Museum in Vevey shows a Leica III with a 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens and says it is the camera he used for The Americans.
Medium-format camera: in Peru he also worked with a 2¼-inch camera, next to the Leica.
From the late 1950s he also worked with film cameras, starting with Pull My Daisy (1959), made with the painter Alfred Leslie.
Books
The Americans (Steidl, 2008). This 50th-anniversary edition was made with Frank himself. The negatives were scanned again, and he re-cropped the images, changing two of them. It keeps the original layout: a short caption on each left page and one photograph on each right page, 83 tritone plates in all, with Jack Kerouac’s introduction. The book was first published by Robert Delpire in Paris in 1958 and by Grove Press in New York in 1959. Start here if you want to see the sequence as Frank wanted it.
Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans (National Gallery of Art with Steidl, 2009). The catalogue of the 50th-anniversary exhibition in Washington, which later travelled to San Francisco and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is written by curator Sarah Greenough with Stuart Alexander and others. It includes essays on his early magazine work, his mentors Walker Evans and Edward Steichen, and his friendship with Kerouac, plus many pages of contact sheets. A deep book for anyone who wants to understand how the pictures were found and edited.
The Lines of My Hand (Yugensha, Tokyo, and Lustrum Press, New York, 1972; new edition Steidl, 2018). A personal, chronological look at his work up to 1972, made with Frank. It moves from early pictures in Switzerland through Peru, Paris, Valencia, London and Wales, shows contact sheets from the American trip, and ends with pictures of his family, collages and stills from his films. Frank wrote in it that these were his last photographs for a while: he felt he had come to the end of a chapter. It began his autobiographical way of making books.
London/Wales (Scalo, 2003). Edited by Philip Brookman and published with an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. It gathers pictures from London in 1951 and early 1952, with bankers, workers, children and people in the fog, and from the mining town of Caerau in Wales in 1953, where he followed the miner Ben James and his family. These are the years just before The Americans, and the book shows his style taking shape.
In his words
“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
“I think I always had a cold eye.”
“But it’s also easier to show the darkness than the joy in life.”
Five well-known photographs and three names under each. Can you name the photographers? Open a hint if you get stuck.