The Brooklyn Rail

Life Dances On, Robert Frank in Dialogue, at the Museum of Modern Art, is an ambitious and courageous exhibition. Curated by Lucy Gallun, who also edited a new monograph on Frank on the occasion of this exhibition, Life Dances On highlights the photographs and film work that Robert Frank made after his epoch defining book The Americans.

Robert Frank was born in 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland. There he learned the basics of photography by apprenticing with several commercial photographers. In 1947 he moved to New York where he worked on personal projects as well as on editorial assignments. In 1955 Frank secured a contract from the French publisher, Delpire, for a book of photographs of the United States. The resulting carefully organized eighty-three black-and-white images that comprise The Americans depict a nation in turmoil. Grove Press published the book in 1960 to mostly negative reviews.

Sensing he had reached a dead-end in still photography, Frank turned to work as a cinematographer and a film director, activities that he continued for the rest of his life. In 1970 Frank and his partner, the artist June Leaf, moved to Mabou, on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada where, in a few years, he returned to making photographs.

Robert Frank is a mythic figure in the collective photographic imagination. For photographers of my generation, The Americans was the premier gateway experience to the immense possibilities of photographic art. Today, sixty years after it was first published The Americans, now available in a new Aperture reprint on the centenary of Frank’s birth, shadows American photography like no other publication. Its influence is so dominant that almost every reviewer of Life Dances On cannot imagine that this exhibition—Frank’s first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art—would not have The Americans as its centerpiece.

To fully appreciate Frank’s later photographs, the apparent goal of this exhibition—viewers need discard almost everything they know and love about The Americans. The social issues that drive The Americans—race, class, immigration, nuclear war—have all but disappeared. Frank no longer looked at the world through the slipping glimpses framed by his small, handheld Leica. In Mabou, Frank began photographing his immediate surroundings—the land he lived on, his house by the sea—with an unlikely camera, a Polaroid Land Model 190 and black-and-white Polaroid film.

In 1943 Edwin Land conceived of an instant photographic process after his daughter impatiently asked him when she could see the photograph he had just taken of her. Four years later, Land debuted an 8x10 inch black and white photographic process that produced a print from a disposable negative fifty seconds after exposure.

In the early 1950s Land came out with a new product, a positive/negative film (P/N) that produced a negative that, after it was chemically “cleared”, could be printed in the darkroom like a conventional negative. Until the P/N negative was dry, careful handling was required to prevent scratching. In Brian Graham’s book Goin’ Down the Road with Robert Frank, we see a photograph of Frank kneeling over a dirty puddle in front of the Cooper Union building washing a Polaroid negative. Because Frank had no darkroom in Mabou Polaroid P/N film allowed him to work with small prints while holding the negatives for printing later in New York.

In 1974 Frank’s daughter Andrea died in a plane crash. Heartbroken, Frank created three photographic cenotaphs to her memory. Andrea, 1975 is composed of a grid of nine Polaroid prints, four of which are overpainted with white. Next to a photograph of Andrea, Frank wrote in small letters “… she lived in this house and I think of Andrea every day.” Two years later Frank created Monument for My Daughter Andrea (ca. 1977), four Polaroid prints depicting tacks of wood that Frank piled into towers to allay his grief. In the margins of two of these Polaroids Frank wrote Andrea’s birth and death dates.

In a third enigmatic work, Andrea, Mabou (1976–78), a doleful collage of four photographs of the foggy Atlantic Ocean, Frank scratched A-N-D-R-E-A onto the photograph itself. Whereas the first two memorial works seem to whisper Andrea’s name, Andrea, Mabou is one of the first works where Frank writes directly on the photograph so as it to speak audibly to the viewer.

This language, etched into the surface of the print is revolutionary. In works like Sick of Goodby’s, (1978) and The suffering, The silence of Pablo (1995) Frank abruptly and cryptically addresses the viewer directly. Because his voice is audible in video clips that play throughout the exhibition, I read these texts on the prints in Frank’s accented English. Unfortunately, when Frank’s voice leaves the surface of his prints and takes roost in the upper margins of his many books, or in the voiceovers of his films, he is less successful. In the 1989 edition of The Lines of my Hand and in the torrent of books that follow, including the MoMA publication that accompanies Life Dances On, Frank speaks and speaks from the page. It’s as if he can’t leave his voice on his photographs.

In her catalogue essay for the exhibition’s monograph Kaitlin Booher describes the photographers, painters and poets Frank was close to in the fifties. I wish this list might continue into the sixties and beyond. How did Frank interact with the experimental film world that he was part of? For instance, what did Frank make of Stan Brackage’s work? Brackage famously signed his films by scratching his name into the emulsion side of black leader frame by frame. And Frank must have known Dziga Vertov’s celebrated still from The Man with a Movie Camera—the eye in the lens of a camer—because Mabou Winter Footage, (1977), the first image of the MoMA catalogue, is an homage to Vertov. Might he have met Vertov’s brother, the cinematographer Boris Kaufman who filmed The Pawnbroker and The Group during this period?

I can’t help wondering how Frank connected with the 1970s art communities in Halifax or Los Angeles. Halifax was home to North America’s most progressive art academy, The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where Frank taught and exhibited. In Los Angeles, Frank and Robert Heinecken collaborated on a Polaroid project. In 1979 Frank exhibited both the The Americans and the new Mabou works in an exhibition at the Long Beach Art Museum.

Questions of influence seem naïve or farfetched because Robert Frank resides in a photo-historical silo created by the myths that surround him. To me it is a little surprising that Frank is never contextualized or even contrasted with 1970s artists working with word and image. Think of Barbara Kruger and her text weighted photographs. Or Frank’s neighbor on Bleeker Street, the sculptor Lawrence Weiner, who stenciled texts on to walls. Or Frank’s near contemporary John Baldessari, whose 1972 video I Am Making Art is as deadpan as anything Frank would make.

The major difference between the conceptualists and Frank is that the conceptualists didn’t consider themselves single-medium artists. Frank, after a dozen year hiatus returned to photography and never left. A clear signal of Frank’s affection for the medium can be found in the vintage contact printing frames which he repurposed to frame some in his 1970’s photographs—“Friends Now Gone Forever ( 1950-1971), Mabou Mines (1975), Bonjour–Maestro (1974), Mabou (1977), and Amherst-Brattleboro (1979). These antique printing frames underline Frank’s fondness for photographic gear and processes.

In 2001 I happened to pass Frank and a friend near 23rd Street. I was interested in his work because my graduate students had told me how his 1970s text works had inspired them. My hope for this exhibition is that it will similarly challenge a new generation of photographers to follow the path blazed by Frank. It is as if he is saying to them, after your early success, go out and make difficult, uncompromising photographs and damn the consequences.