THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 9, 1994 TAG: 9411090019
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 175 lines
FORTY YEARS AGO, legendary Swiss photographer Robert Frank - subject of a major show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington - was trying to coax funds from the Guggenheim Foundation to make a ``broad, voluminous picture record'' of America.
His idea was to photograph ``what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere.''
With the help of influential friends, Frank - who turns 70 today - got the grant. So he piled in his streamlined Ford Business Coupe and headed to New Orleans, Detroit, Los Angeles. Anywhere his gut sent him. He made it his method to shoot honestly, and from the hip, whatever dark and shiny images caught his eye. He did not censor himself. He did not lean on his substantial intellect. Rather, he let his feelings dictate the shots.
Though Frank hadn't yet met him, he was following poet Allen Ginsberg's dictum: ``First thought, best thought.''
It was very beat, this behavior. As in beatnik. And it was how he lived through 1955 and 1956. Sometimes he took his wife, Mary, and their two young children. Other times, he'd hook up with hitchhikers or swing through small towns solo.
Hunting. Looking. Looking critically. Relating personally to what he saw and shot. Seeing himself in scenes.
He shot more than 600 rolls of black-and-white film, then spent months carefully picking through and editing all those snippets of observed life in the far corners of America.
A Detroit drug store decorated like a child's birthday party with advertisements for Orange Whip 10(CT). A lone fellow finishing the saddest supper in a San Francisco cafeteria. Three well-heeled California boys sitting in a fancy new car at a ``Motorama'' show, getting the feel of their fortunate future. A black nanny holding a porcelain-skinned white baby with pursed lips, as if practicing to project racial superiority.
In one picture, a black woman in Beaufort, S.C., apparently a farm worker, sits in a chair out in the middle of a field, glorying in the sunset. The undulating white lines on her skirt are like the white highway lines that led Frank to this woman, who appears freer inside than so many of the well-to-do white folks he's encountered.
So Frank finally settled on 83 of these pictures in a careful sequence intended to suggest subtle, poetic relationships - a new idea for photography. And these pictures became a 1959 book, ``The Americans,'' which remains the most celebrated work by a man deemed by some scholars the most important photographer since World War II.
The first retrospective of Frank's work is on view through Dec. 31 at the National Gallery of Art and is called ``Robert Frank: Moving Out.'' Frank is the first living photographer to be honored with a solo show at the museum.
The exhibit contains 159 photos dating from 1944 in Switzerland, when he was learning the craft as an apprentice, to the present. The show itself is a journey, delving deeper and deeper into Frank's psyche as the years progressed.
Much of the later work has never been exhibited or published. The chronological installation of the show reveals to what extent his art became increasingly naked in expressing the ragged emotions of a downbeat autobiography.
Much of the later work is focused on dealing with his past, even getting past his past, which includes such tragedies as his daughter Andrea's death at age 20 in a plane crash, followed by the presumed murder of his friend and collaborator Danny Seymour. It also grieves him that his other child, son Pablo, 43, has spent much of his life in psychiatric hospitals.
Soon after ``The Americans,'' the singular still photograph became an insufficient expression for him. By the late '50s, he began making films and combining images. From then on, he would conduct a free exchange, featuring his photographs in the avant garde films, and utilizing film stills in his photography.
In 1959, he co-directed his first movie, ``Pull My Daisy,'' a beat classic with plot and dialogue by Jack Kerouac.
One publisher originally sought novelist William Faulkner to write the introduction for ``The Americans.'' More appropriately, it was Kerouac who got the job. His writing shares much with Frank's photography.
Kerouac on Frank:
``That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically 48 states in an old used car and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.''
Like Kerouac, Frank made his special book of photographs to be as one long, rambling sentence, like Route 66 only pausing for blinking yellow lights always keeping the motor running.
Like Walt Whitman in his ``Leaves of Grass,'' Frank discovered a personal America from an ecstatic, humanist perspective.
The way Kerouac saw it, Frank ``sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.''
In 1990 and in 1994, Frank gave the majority of his photographic archives to the National Gallery. Virtually all of his negatives before 1970 went to the National Gallery, plus 1,000 work and rare vintage prints and 1,500 contact sheets.
It wasn't the gift that prompted the show, said Sarah Greenough, the gallery's curator of photography and co-organizer of the exhibit.
``His impact has been profound,'' she began. ``No other photographer since World War II, European or American, has been more influential. Without question.''
One of his major accomplishments was to ``merge the documentary tradition with a more fine art tradition. In other words, he took photographs of the world around us, and was able to make those expressive, not just of the world and culture, but also of his feelings. So he made documentary photography a very personal means of expression.''
His unique way of working ``gave a critical spark to the whole style of street photography that took off in the 1960s'' that included such photographers as Lee Friedlander and Bruce Davidson, she said.
With ``The Americans,'' Frank bucked a national myth. He was, in fact, reacting to the patriotic, optimistic photo stories published in Life and Look magazines at that time.
In 1975, Frank recalled that his approach with ``The Americans'' was indeed influenced by his ``tremendous contempt'' for Life's picture stories, which he saw as perpetuating the American Dream myth he never found on the road.
The book was not celebrated when published, Greenough said. Among those who actually reviewed ``The Americans,'' few liked it. An editor at Popular Photography magazine wrote that Frank's book showed him to be ``a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption.''
Another reviewer compared Frank to Kerouac, noting that ``you will find the same studious inattention to the skills of the craft, the same desire to shock and provide cheap thrills.''
Within a decade, however, Frank was a cult hero. Appreciation for ``The Americans'' rose from the underground, taking a similar path as Kerouac's ``On the Road.''
Even today, Frank's big book ``looks incredibly strong,'' Greenough said.
``I was flying back from Lalaland recently, seated next to this filmmaker. And I was reading a lot of articles about Frank. Finally, the filmmaker said to me, `Is that the person who recently published a book about America?' ''
He wouldn't believe Greenough, that the photos were taken in the mid-'50s.
``For him, the work had such relevance. For him, it still spoke so strongly about current issues.''
Frank hit that high note half a lifetime ago. Since then he's been living quietly, and very modestly, shuttling back and forth between a lower Manhattan loft and an old fisherman's shack in the bleak town of Mabou in Nova Scotia. He lives with his second wife, June Leaf, an artist.
Short and soulful with a masklike face, Frank grants few interviews and has a reputation for being ``shy and ornery,'' as The New York Times put it.
Actually, he's ``an extraordinarily generous person,'' Greenough said. ``Once he comes to be close to someone, he's a very good friend to that person. Very concerned about the events of that person's life.''
And while he's still admired, even worshipped, by members of the art community, the general public has hardly heard of him. Even well-educated people haven't heard of Frank, Greenough said.
The New York Times described him as ``perhaps the least reformed surviving member of the Beat Generation and has as little to do with the New York art world as he can get away with, staying willfully removed from contemporary trends.''
So why is the show called ``Moving Out''?
For one, that's the title of a 1985 piece by Frank featuring photos of three places he used to live, photographed as he was moving out. The title also suggests ``the restlessness in his work, his inability to sit still,'' Greenough said. ``His constant pushing, stretching.''
It could also refer to the feeling in the show of an artist gauging the shape of his life's work. ``There does get to be the sense of an artist thinking that things are coming to an end, winding up his life's work.
``Maybe it's inevitable when you get to be his age.'' MEMO: Related article by Paul Richard, Washington Post on page E5. ILLUSTRATION: Photos by Robert Frank
Robert Frank, Eugene M. Schwartz Associates, Inc.
City Fathers - Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955
Robert Frank, Philadelphia Museum of Art, D. Norman Fund
Parade - Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955
ROBERT FRANK, National Gallery of Art, Washington
A couple in Paris in 1952, part of the Robert Frank exhibit ``Moving
Out'' at the National Gallery of Art.
Frank's work indicates a sense of restlessness as noted in this
photo ``Sick of Goodby's'' from 1978.
by CNB