FILTER
An Evening with Robert Frank, Celebrating 50 years of Photos
- Author: Min-Q Kim
- Posted on: Wednesday October 28, 2009 at 11:00 AM
- Filed under: art, photography, robert frank, jack kerouac, the americans, metropolitan museum, exclusive
Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes. -Jack Kerouac, from the Introduction to The Americans
Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955
Private collection, San Francisco
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans, via metmuseum.org
I had the privelege this month (on October 9th) to attend a lecture, or more of a round table discussion, with photographer and living legend Robert Frank at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. His world-renowned book, The Americans, is widely considered to be the single most important photography book since World War II. Now celebrating its 50-year anniversary (the book was first published in the US in 1959), the Met Museum currently has a full exhibit dedicated to those 83 indellible images and the man who traversed the country to capture them.
From his modest entrance onto the stage, Robert Frank was upbeat, if not a bit off-beat, gracious, and thoroughly enjoyable. Reflecting on his now-legendary (almost hallowed) trek around the dusty corners of the United States, Frank told of the suspicious eyes that looked back at his voyeuristic, mechanical one. Lest we forget, he was going around surreptitiously taking pictures of strangers -- foreign accent and all -- in the midst of a Cold War and the lingering paranoia of McCarthyism. "You were a spy!" he exclaimed when asked why a stealth photographer at the time might be met with such hostility.
Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
Trolley—New Orleans, 1955
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005 (2005.100.454)
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans, via metmuseum.org
My favorite bits of the lecture were the stories Frank told about the road trip he took to Florida with Jack Kerouac, who wrote the Forward to The Americans. The men behind the two greatest American travelogues in the same car? What kind of adventure did they seek out? High-stake poker games, drag races, fast women...? "He slept most of the time," Frank recalled: a stark reality, no doubt, compared to the glossy, romantic, starry-eyed visions that danced in many a modern beat-poet's head. Frank drove back to New York with Kerouac, Kerouac's mother, and her two cats, he said.
When asked if it was true that he stopped back at the same barber shop that appears in his book, where they offered to buy his car in exchange for two older cars...
"I don't remember that. The stories change over time," Frank replied.
He's a photographer, folks. He tells it like it is.
If you get a chance, be sure to check out the Robert Frank exhibit at the Met Museum, which runs through January 3, 2010. His photos tell a story you won't soon forget.
What a poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some young new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every gray mysterious detail, the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind. -Jack Kerouac, from The Americans
Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
Charleston, South Carolina, 1955
Susan and Peter MacGill
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans, via metmuseum.org
Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
Elevator—Miami Beach, 1955
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1969
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans, via metmuseum.org
Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
U.S. 90, En Route to Del Rio, Texas, 1955
Private collection, courtesy Hamiltons Gallery, London
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans, via metmuseum.org
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