Robert Frank, photographer

This evening while I was preparing Moroccan chicken stew with pearl couscous, sweet potato, and cauliflower, I listened—as I have recently become fond of doing—to a podcast. I tend to start with the New York Times's "The Daily." Today's episode was about police killings, but when it was done it rolled over to yesterday's offering: a reading of a 2105 profile of Swiss American photographer Robert Frank, "The Man Who Saw America" by Nicholas Dawidoff (this link includes both the print article and the read version). What a treat! He was a crusty, opinionated, uncompromising man with a careful yet emotional aesthetic sense. (Here is another summary of his legacy. And another. And yet another. He was well loved, and much discussed.)

Robert Frank inspecting
negatives, ca. 1956

I have Frank's 1958 book The Americans (somewhere in the garage). I love it. It presents a complex view of this confounded country at midcentury. As Dawidoff characterizes this body of work, "Frank hoped to express the emotional rhythms of the United States, to portray underlying realities and misgivings—how it felt to be wealthy, to be poor, to be in love, to be alone, to be young or old, to be black or white, to live along a country road or to walk a crowded sidewalk, to be overworked or sleeping in parks, to be a swaggering Southern couple or to be young and gay in New York, to be politicking or at prayer."

I was delighted to be reminded of The Americans. One day, I would love to see the prints in person—so much better than half-tone reproductions in a book. Frank died last September at the age of 94, and of course he did other work in the last few decades of his life, including filmmaking, but he will probably live on most securely in these pointed observations of his adopted country.

Here are a few of those images (as always, click to view them large on black):

"Trolley—New Orleans" 1955

"Fourth of July—Jay, New York" 1955

"Covered Car—Long Beach, California" 1955/1956

"Car Accident—U.S. 66 between
Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona" 1956

"Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey" 1955

"Indianapolis" 1956

Drive-in Movie—Detroit" 1955

"Funeral—St. Helena, South Carolina" 1955

Apparently there's a 50th-anniversary edition of The Americans with superior reproductions of the photos. I might just have to seek it out. Keeping me out of the garage for another day.