OCTOBER 6, 2009 Volume 1, Issue 7 At the Galleries: Maya Lin, Raoul DeKeyser, James Brooks, et al. Paint The Town: Met Opera Opening & the junior circuit thrives.
Separate & Unequal The Met’s exhibit of Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ reminds us of an irony-free time that we’ll never experience again. BY DAVID FREEDLANDER n the introduction to a set of images that would later become The Americans, Walker Evans wrote about Robert Frank, his friend and protégé: “Assuredly the gods who sent Robert Frank, so heavily armed, across the United States did so with a certain smile…He shows high irony towards a nation that generally speaking has it not.” It has been over 50 years now since Frank—with the aid of a Guggenheim grant ghostwritten by his pal Evans—was unleashed upon this continent with his Leica and his beat-up Ford, stealing hidden moments from a country stranger and younger than the one we know. Much of what is found here is as unfamiliar to contemporary viewers as it was for Frank, then a relatively recent Swiss émigré when he set off to on his project to photograph, “the people in the midst of this era of progress,” as he wrote in an early draft to the Guggenheim committee. Inspired by documentary photographers such as Evans and Dorothea Lange, it was a radical attempt to capture on film a side the country that had otherwise been ignored. When Frank set out across the country, however, the dominant mode in photography was of the type found in the pages of Life magazine and promoted by the dominant European photographer of the times, Edward Steichen: poetic realism marked by formal clarity that tended towards the sentimental. Frank’s photographers instead are
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans
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ROBERT FRANK on page 13