WHAT I LIKE ABOUT THE WORK OF… AN INTRODUCTION.
Got a favourite photographer, historical or contemporary, living or dead? Someone who has influenced you, continues to influence you. Someone whose work never fails to delight and inspire no matter how many times you look at it. If so, this is the place to talk about it. WHAT I LIKE ABOUT THE WORK OF… will be a regular feature in photofrappé. So we’ll be looking from contributions from you to build up an archive. Keep it to a couple of hundred words. And if you have images to support your paean, all the better. Send them as jpgs no bigger than 1280pix. We look forward to your submissions.
#1 What I like about the work of Robert Frank
“To Robert Frank I now give you this message: You got eyes.” Jack Kerouac said that in his introduction to Frank’s seminal work ‘The Americans’ first published in 1958.
‘You got eyes’ is just about the highest compliment you can pay anybody with pretensions to being a ‘photographer’. It’s probably more important than the technical skills or equipment. No, not probably, definitely.
And here’s the thing about Robert Frank: not only has he got eyes, but also wit, a sense of the ironic, an uncanny ability to capture what Kerouac dubbed ‘American-ness’ and, for the time, the courage to reveal what he, Frank, believed lay at the heart of ‘American-ness’. Robert Frank came to the States in the mid-1940s with an upbeat outlook on American life, particularly its culture. That quickly changed when some of the true colours of American society began to show through, the love of the almighty dollar, an often blind chauvinism and ritual patriotism, class, racial and religious tensions.
All of these themes and more are explored in Frank’s seminal work ‘The Americans’. Influenced by the work of Walker Evans, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship grant, Frank took nearly 30,000 shots over two years traveling from coast to coast. Just over 80 of these shots made it into the book.
What I most like about the work of Frank, in particular ‘The Americans’ is the fact that despite his training, technical skills and background as an art, graphic and fashion photographer, here he captured images which the critics of the time considered ‘sloppy and muddy’, but which later were – and still are – judged to be an accurate investigation of what the late John Szarkowski called ‘the gaudy insanities and strangely touching contradictions of American culture.’ Frank’s images are not about technical perfection, they are about raw fact.
In my opinion the iconography captured by Frank in ‘The Americans’ provides as true a picture of the American condition today as when he made those images in the 1950s.
fred shively
photographer
