Part One

In the autumn of 2019, two giants of American photographic arts died, a mere seven days apart from each other. They were close friends and neighbors in the New York of the ‘50s, at one time even working together on the same project (a film). Both were Jewish, and deeply humanistic, and both had children who died before they did. One is probably the most important photographer of the second half of the 20th century and a legend in his own time. The other is less well known as a photographer, but a legend too, as his accumulative accomplishments in so many artistic fields together perhaps surpass his old friend’s. I remain in awe of both.

The American broke all the rules of photography and photojournalism, of photography books and social norms. It was somewhat inspired by three other works: Swiss Jakob Tuggener’s 1943 filmic book Fabrik, Bill Brandt’s The English at Home (1936) surveying societal strata, and Walker Evans’ American Photographs (1938). Frank’s take on America was darker than Evans’, and his view broader than Brandt’s. The grainy pictures contained movement and blur, the camera sometimes tilted, subjects were off-center. There were no captions; you had to “read” the images, then travel through their sequencing to discern meaning.

At first American publishers wouldn’t touch it, as it’s picture of America was far from rosy; so it was first published in Paris by Robert Delpire in 1958 as Les Americans, with an introduction by Evans (but also texts by Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck interspersed with with Frank’s photographs). In 1959 Grove Press published it in the US more as Frank had intended it, without texts, save a new introduction by the Beat writer, Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road was published in 1957 and impressed Frank with “the speed of it, taking you back and forth across the country, his descriptions of the landscape in the morning, the little towns, which he describes with such exquisite beauty — the love for America.’’ Kerouac’s intro in turn praised Frank, writing “With one hand he sucked a sad poem of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.” “To Robert Frank,” he ended his text, “you got eyes.”

Sales of The Americans, slow at first, increased as Kerouac’s involvement proposed it to a younger audience and the work began influencing other photographers. At the time photography was what Walker Evans termed “a disdained medium” with very few American art museums exhibiting or collecting it (Frank frequently complained that the Museum of Modern Art refused to sell The Americans in its shop). In 1961 Frank received his first solo exhibition, at the Art Institute of Chicago – by which time he’d already given up photography to make films. By the time I fully appreciated the book as a student in San Francisco in the late ’60s, it was iconic, virtually revered amongst the photography students. It remains to this day one of the most influential books of photography ever published. Peter Schjeldahl, longtime art critic at The New Yorker, called it ‘‘one of the basic American masterpieces of any medium.’’

Frank’s abandoning photography just as The Americans received its US publication shocked the photo community. After publishing one more, small body of photographs made from the windows of often moving New York City busses in 1958, Frank turned to creating films which also broke most of the accepted rules of filmmaking. The first of these, in 1959, was the freewheeling Beat masterpiece Pull My Daisy, with performances by Alan Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and other Beats, with Jack Kerouac’s narration. Frank continued making personal films through the 2000s. Younger directors would later revere Frank as the godfather of independent film.

Probably his best known (most notorious) film is the 1972 Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues. A contentious fight with the Stones resulted in court orders restricting its presentation in the US to just five showings a year and only in the presence of the filmmaker (I don’t know where this stands now that he has died). In ’72 he also published a new volume of mostly old photographs, the autobiographical The Lines of My Hand, with photographer Ralph Gibson’s Lustrum Press.

I met Robert Frank only once, when Gibson brought him to the San Francisco Art Institute in 1971 or ’72. There we printed out and hung enlarged versions of his contact sheets for The Americans (a revelation) and he looked at some of our portfolios. He was silent looking through my photographs, so much so that I thought he found nothing of interest. Then suddenly he pulled one out and held it over his head, demanding everyone come look at it. So, one! That emboldened me to speak to him, photographer to photographer, and I asked him about the last picture in The Americans, looking back at his wife Mary and son Pablo in the passenger side of his second-hand Ford, “Luce” (the only connection he ever had with Mr. Henry Luce, he’d say).

But I’d overstepped unseen boundaries (I hadn’t realized the marriage had recently dissolved or that Frank likely felt responsible). I don’t remember exactly what I asked or his reply, but I remember how it felt: like a knife inserted into my guts, twisted, then jerked upward. It literally took my breadth away, and ended the discussion. You could see something like that on his contact sheets too. Usually just two or three jabs before landing the knockout, almost always the last shot, before moving on. He knew when he’d got what he was looking for and that was it. It was that self-knowledge that enabled him to leave being a street photographer; he’d done what he set out to do and did not intend to repeat himself.

Here are a few quote of Frank’s I like:

“Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair…”

–William Messer