Fragments of Living - Poetry and Performativity in the Works of Robert Frank by John Farrell

Fragments of Living: Poetry and Performativity in the works of Robert Frank

John Farrell Fine Art Photography Glasgow School of Art 2014/2015 Dr. Sarah Lowndes / Dr. Sarah Smith 9817 Words

Fragments of Living: Poetry and Performativity in the works of Robert Frank

Synopsis This dissertation examines the work of Robert Frank (b.1924), a Swiss-born artist who redefined photography, permanently changing the nature of the art form. His seminal publication The Americans (1958) completely altered the way we engage with and understand photography through his use of sequencing within the book and his abandonment of the strict visual conventions of the time, opting instead to photograph intuitively.

Frank’s work revealed how photographs could be read: much in the same way we read poetry, paying close attention to rhythm, cadence and tone. However, I argue that Frank’s most recent contributions to the world of fine art photography tell us much more about the poetic and performative possibilities inherent within the medium. In the dissertation I address these later works, examine the further evolution of this intuitive means of making photographs and explore why it is that they have largely gone unrecognised.

By charting some of Frank’s earliest works, pre-The Americans, through to the artist’s books published this year and paying close attention to Frank’s film and video works, I attempt to redress the balance and move critical discussion away from concentration on a single book published more than fifty years ago. I examine a number of primary and secondary sources, including interviews with Frank, comprehensive exhibition catalogues and the artist’s books themselves, in order to assess the fundamental shifts in the career of a maker who is always looking forward.

Contents

1. List of Illustrations 2. Introduction 3. Addressing ‘The Americans’ 4. Poetry and Performativity in the Photographs and Video Works 5. The Visual Diaries and beyond 6. Conclusion 7. Bibliography 8. Appendix

List of Illustrations

Fig.1

Robert Frank Bar – Gallup, New Mexico The Americans (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2008) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig.2

Robert Frank Untitled Peru (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2009) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig.3

Robert Frank Yom Kippur – East River, New York City The Americans (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2008) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig.4

Robert Frank 4am Make Love to Me Battleboro, Vermont, Decemeber 24, 1974 The Lines of My Hand (Zurich, PARKETT / DER ALLTAG Publishers Ltd, 1989) First PARKETT / DER ALLTAG Edition, Un-paginated

Fig.5

Fig.7

Robert Frank Blind/Love/Faith, Mabou 1981 The Lines of My Hand (Zurich, PARKETT / DER ALLTAG Publishers Ltd, 1989) First PARKETT / DER ALLTAG Edition, Un-paginated

Robert Frank For Andrea, 1975 The Lines of My Hand (Zurich, PARKETT / DER ALLTAG Publishers Ltd, 1989) First PARKETT / DER ALLTAG Edition, Un-paginated

Fig.6

Robert Frank Sick of Goodbyes, Mabou, 1978 The Lines of My Hand (Zurich, PARKETT/DER ALLTAG Publishers Ltd. 1989) First PARKETT / DER ALLTAG Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 8

Robert Frank Hold Still, Keep Going, 1989 The Lines of My Hand (Zurich, PARKETT/DER ALLTAG Publishers Ltd, 1989) First PARKETT / DER ALLTAG Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 9

Robert Frank Switzerland Tal Uf Tal Ab (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2010) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 11

Robert Frank USA Tal Uf Tal Ab (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2010) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 10

Robert Frank Jack Kerouac Tal Uf Tal Ab (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2010) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 12

Robert Frank En Route from New York to Washington, Club Car The Americans (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2008) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 13

Robert Frank U.S. 285, New Mexico The Americans (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2008) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 14

Robert Frank Untitled Partida (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2014) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 15

Robert Frank Untitled Household Inventory Record (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2013) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 16

Robert Frank Untitled Household Inventory Record (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2013) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 17

Robert Frank Untitled Seven Stories (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2009) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 18

Robert Frank Mabou Tal Uf Tal Ab (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2010) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 19

Robert Frank Untitled Seven Stories (Göttingen, Germany. Steidl, 2009) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 20

Screen grab of Robert Frank’s 2004/2008 film True Story 13 mins 20 secs

Fig. 21

Robert Frank Blind/Love/Faith Household Inventory Record (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2013) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 23

Robert Frank Untitled Household Inventory Record (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2013) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 22

Robert Frank The War is Over, 1998 Hold Still, Keep Going (Zurich-Berlin-New York, Museum Folkwang Essen and Scalo 2001) First Scalo Edition, page 56

Fig. 24

Fig. 25

Robert Frank Untitled Household Inventory Record (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2013) First Steidl Edition, Un-paginated

Fig. 26

Installation view of Robert Frank’s 2014 exhibition Books, Films, 1947 – 2014 at the Anna Leonowens in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Image Source: http://www.americanphotomag.com/article/2014/09/following-popshow-robert-frank-will-have-exhibition-prints-destroyed Accessed 20/2/15

Introduction The primary focus of this dissertation is analysing the late works of Robert Frank (b.1924). I look particularly at the latest works, some of which are published as part of The Robert Frank 1

Project, the collaboration with Gerhard Steidl that began in 2008. The Robert Frank Project is an ambitious long term publishing programme which encompasses Robert Frank’s complete oeuvre – reprints of his classic books, reprints of some less well known small books, the publication of some previously unseen projects, newly conceived bookworks, and his Complete Film Works in a specially designed collector’s DVD set. This ensures the legacy of this original and seminal artist and that Robert Frank’s work will be available and accessible in 2 scheme and to a standard the artist himself has overseen. Throughout the dissertation I draw upon a wide array of primary and secondary research and source material in order to review the crucial and specific roles of poetry and performativity within both the most recently published visual diaries (Tal Uf Tal Ab (2010), You Would (2012), Park/Sleep (2013) Partida (2014) etc.) and Frank’s oeuvre in general. Examining his life and work allows in depth discussion of the importance of Frank’s late work in terms of both his own practice as a whole and its role within contemporary photographic practice in a broader sense, touching upon the artists and photographers that can be seen to have benefitted from this redefining of artistic terms and medium.

It is my hope that this dissertation goes some way to redress the lack of critical analysis of these most recent works by an artist who is often lauded as ‘the most extraordinary living 3

photographic picture-maker’ and ‘one of the most important and influential American independent filmmakers of the last half-century.’

Can Frank’s work ever truly be separated from the legacy of The Americans (1958), those eighty photographs published well over fifty years ago? How do we understand an artist

Gerhard Steidl is a world-renowned international publisher of photo books who has worked closely with Robert Frank in order to realize the long term ‘Robert Frank Project’. 2 Robert Frank Published by Steidl. Excerpt taken from the Steidl Catalogue detailing the intentions and aims of ‘The Robert Frank Project’. http://www.steidlville.com/pictures/pdf/Steidl_Frank_Catalogue_A4.pdf 3 Thomas Joshua Cooper. Thomas Joshua Cooper’s Best Shot. Interviewed by Leo Benedictus for The th Guardian newspaper, 28 August 2008. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/aug/28/photography.art1 Accessed 12/10/14 4 Manhola Dargis. Robert Frank Collection. Introduction to the Robert Frank Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 12/10/14

whose work flits between still and moving image and often exists within the intersection between the two? What does it mean when these films and videos are largely unseen and remain in obscurity and perhaps more importantly what causes an artist in his nineties to suddenly begin publishing a flurry of material that has rarely been seen before, is previously unpublished or is even completely new altogether? Furthermore, what happens when this goes seemingly largely unnoticed? These are the questions I intend answering, while also speaking to my own interest in the performative and poetic qualities that are present throughout the work, qualities that become less and less oblique as time progresses.

Besides drawing heavily on a number of existing expert sources, I have conducted my own research interviews with those who know the work best, including conversations with fellow photographic artist Professor Thomas Joshua Cooper who met and spoke with Robert Frank at length in his studio in Mabou, Nova Scotia. I have also researched Frank’s working relationship with Gerhard Steidl, his long term publisher and collaborator in The Robert Frank Collection, as well as some of the curators and scholars who have co-ordinated and curated some of Frank’s major retrospectives over the last two decades. I draw from this primary research to aid the discussion within this dissertation paper.

Addressing ‘The Americans’ 5

In his essay ‘The Bohemian Beat Poetics of Robert Frank’ , Philip Gefter opens with the statement that: No one has had a greater influence on photography in the last half century than Robert Frank, despite the fact that his towering reputation rests almost entirely on a 6 single, modest book published five decades ago. Why is it that, despite being published well over fifty years ago, to this day much of the critical discussion of Frank’s work still revolves around those eighty photographs? Whilst it is true that it is an extremely important book within the history of photography, I would argue that it represents only part of Frank’s oeuvre and that instead it should be viewed in tandem with his other works, created both before and after The Americans. It is difficult, if not impossible, however, to discuss the work of Robert Frank without at first addressing the matter of The Americans, which is widely perceived to be one of the most important books of photography published in the post-war period and remains the single work that Frank is most recognised for. Published first in Paris in 1957 by Robert Delpire (b.1926) as Lés Americains and then the following year in the United States by Barney Rosset (1922 – 2012) and Grove Press, Robert Frank’s small book of eighty photographs made on a 10,0007

mile journey around the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship completely altered how photographs could be read and understood. Frank’s understanding of the poetic and performative possibilities within photography is apparent even at this early stage of his artistic career. It has been noted how, in terms of the design and physicality of the book, it functions almost 8

as if it were a ‘paper movie’ . Through Frank and Delpire’s deliberate and decisive sequencing of the photographs it is easy to recognise the cinematic experience of viewing images. This performative element inherent within the layout and design of the book would have been particularly striking given its first publication during the golden age of

Philip Gefter is a writer and photography critic who has written a number of essays on contemporary photography, including a book called ‘Photography After Frank’, which compiles a group of essays that discusses the effects and implications of ‘The Americans’ within contemporary photography. He writes regularly for The New York Times where he was once a picture editor. http://aperture.org/shop/photography-after-frank. Accessed: 18/11/14 6 Philip Gefter. The Bohemian Beat Poetics of Robert Frank in Traces, Foam Magazine, Issue #25, Winter 2010. http://www.foam.org/foam-magazine/issues/issue-25-traces and http://issuu.com/foammagazine/docs/25_traces/138?e=0 Accessed 10/10/14 7 Robert Frank was the first European-born photographer to be awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship which was established in 1925 to “add to the educational, literary, artistic and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding.” http://www.gf.org/history-people/history-of-the-fellowship/ Accessed: 23/10/14 8 Colin Westerbeck. Episode 3: Paper Movies in The Genius of Photography. (BBC Films and Wall to

Wall Television Limited 2009)

photojournalism. Writer and curator Colin Westerbeck described Frank’s acute awareness of the sequencing and the design of the book when interviewed for the BBC series The Genius of Photography (2007). Westerbeck explained the cinematic quality inherent within the layout and the particular viewing experience Frank hoped to achieve: He doesn’t want you to be distracted by the book; in fact he doesn’t want you to look at more than one picture at a time. He doesn’t want the eye to jump around; he wants you to take each one in so that as you turn the page that little retinal retention will superimpose one picture on the next one. Frank wants you, as with a movie projection, to be going through at the same speed so that the subtlety of the pictures is what will accumulate and make the movie, not the mechanical push-pull design of 10 the book. Through repeatedly showing only one photograph at a time, each almost uniformly placed on the right hand page of the book, Frank creates the kind of visual cadence that Westerbeck described. This, in combination with Frank’s deliberate sequencing and the symbolic imagery that appears throughout the set of photographs - the American flag, a jukebox, a cross to name but a few - cements this notion of the ‘paper movie’ as referred to previously. Frank himself seems to have acknowledged this poetic, almost cinematic understanding and approach to image making in his application for the Guggenheim Fellowship and these would become radically apparent in subsequent photographs that would become The Americans. I speak of the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere — easily found, not easily selected and interpreted. A small catalog comes to the mind’s eye: a town at night, a parking lot, a supermarket, a highway, the man who owns three cars and the 11 man who owns none. Many of the photographs appear to share a lyrical instinctiveness, as Frank uses the symbolism inherent within the pictures much in the same way a poet would use a stanza, enabling him to create a clear structure and help aid the visual pacing of the work. Frank himself acknowledges this in an interview with Philip Gefter in 2008: I’m very proud of this book because I followed my intuition…the idea of making a photographic chronicle of America wasn’t simply to take one picture at a time; it was 12 a larger endeavor, a matter of putting a book together the way I saw it.

Colin Westerbeck is a writer, curator and lecturer in the History of Photography. He has taught at UCLA and was a curator of Photography at the Arts Institute of Chicago as well as regularly writing for the Los Angeles Times. 10 Colin Westerbeck. Episode 3: Paper Movies in The Genius of Photography. (BBC Films and Wall to Wall Television Limited 2009) 11 Manhola Dargis. On Roads He Traveled. Article in the New York Times detailing the exhibition of Robert Frank’s films ‘Mapping a Journey’ at Anthology Film Archive, New York. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/08/movies/08fran.html?_r=0 Accessed: 23/10/14 12 Philip Gefter.Snapshots from the American Road, New York Times 12/12/08. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/arts/design/14geft.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Accessed 10/10/14

Frank created many of pictures blindly, often literally shooting from the hip, as was the case in a Native American bar in Gallup, New Mexico (fig.1). He embraced the inherent idiosyncrasies of photographic material in order to create a body of photographs that broke radically with the stringent and long held photographic values of that time. Frank once famously described his hope that, when people viewed his work, he wanted them to ‘…feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.’

Whilst on the surface some of the photographs may seem simplistic and snapshot in terms of their aesthetic quality, Frank did not make these photographs simply by chance or accident. He spent a number of years training rigorously in his native Zurich, and the work contained in his portfolio

of photographs that he brought with him to America clearly showed he was a

consummate picture maker. However, the photographs in The Americans, and indeed in some of Frank’s earlier works that have been published subsequently as part of the Robert Frank Project, do not adhere to the rigorous and formalist training he received in his homeland. It would seem that, from the very early stages of his career, Frank’s intentions to pursue his own vision were clear. In his book Peru; made originally in 1949 as a gift for his mother and for his art director at 15

Harper’s Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch (1898 – 1971), one can begin to see the transition from some of the more formalist elements in Frank’s portfolio toward the looser, more intuitive way of making photographs that would become synonymous with The Americans. It seems obvious from the work that Frank’s experiences of making photographs in Peru served as a way of sharpening his eye, as visual motifs and a recurrent stanza-like pictorial symbolism begin to appear. Much of the work in Peru can be seen as a clear blueprint for the photographs he would later make on his travels around the United States, and indeed some of the same pictorial symbols are carried over from one work to the other (fig.2-3). Frank’s use of repetition and sequencing in these early works show his keen understanding of structuring photographs in a way that function beyond the mere documentary qualities inherent in the medium. Frank’s deliberate sequencing serves to try to establish a clear visual narrative that would speak more of the body of work as a whole than of any individual photograph. No single image within Peru particularly stands out; rather, the work is balanced and exists as a whole. As a result the work is stronger than the sum of its constituent parts.

13 Frank, Robert. LIFE Magazine, (26th November 1951) p.21 14 Frank’s early portfolio of photographs made in and around Switzerland between 1941 and 1946 as well as containing works of other photographers that Frank retouched. A facsimile of the portfolio was published as part of ‘The Robert Frank Project’ in 2009. http://www.steidl.de/flycms/en/Books/Portfolio/0315223548.html Accessed: 23/10/14 15 Alexey Brodovitch was a Russian born émigré to the United States who was the famous art director at Harper’s Bazaar between 1934 and 1958. http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/bazaar140-0607 Accessed: 23/10/14

Throughout his early career, Frank’s deliberate choice of images served to establish his unique visual language and his attempts to make this apparent to the viewer. This approach had much more in common with his peers in the Beat Generation and their ‘stream of consciousness’ style of writing than with many of his photographic contemporaries at that 16

time, save perhaps for William Klein . Gerry Badger

notes in his book The Genius of

Photography: How Photography Has Changed Our Lives; ‘Stream-of-Consciousness’ also describes the work of such photographers of the period as Robert Frank or William Klein…Because of an insistence upon photographing either the immediately personal or mediating the world through the 18 personal, this style also became known as the ‘diaristic’ mode. Like Frank, Klein also published an iconoclastic book of photographs that shared in this new kind of visual language. Badger had previously described the shared radicalism of both Frank and Klein in his 2004 essay The Indecisive Moment: Frank, Klein and ‘Stream of Consciousness’ Photography: Half the time the photographers seemed not to have even looked through the camera. Far from seeking the perfect composition, the ‘decisive moment’, their work seemed curiously unfinished. It captured ‘indecisive’ rather than decisive moments. It was exciting, expressive, flying in the face of accepted photographic good taste. Importantly, this was a style whose informality was far better suited to the book form 19 than to display as individual prints on a wall. Badger emphasises the significance of the ‘indecisive moment’, a reaction to the approach to photography championed by Henri Cartier-Bresson

(1908- 2004). Following its publication in

1952, Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment went on to form one of the foundations of modern photojournalism. The notion of the ‘decisive moment’ was described by Badger as being: ‘…The moment when every element in the viewfinder coalesces to make a 21

picture…when form and content come together to produce an image…’ . However, the term ‘indecisive’ does not seem adequate in this context. Frank had received rigorous photographic training in his native Zurich and so was already a consummate and conscious

16 William Klein was born in 1928 in New York. He received the Prix Nadar in 1956 for his book ‘Life is Good For You in New York’. Much like Frank, Klein’s photographs embraced the blur and grain of the photographic material in order to create a new visual language. http://www.gallery51.com/index.php?navigatieid=9&fotograafid=46. Accessed 1/12/14 17 Gerry Badger is a photographer, architect and critic who has written extensively on photography. Biography http://www.gerrybadger.com/biog/. Accessed 1/12/14 18 Gerry Badger. The Genius of Photography: How Photography Has Changed Our Lives (Quadrille

Publishing Limited, 2008) p.121 19 Gerry Badger. The Indecisive Moment: Frank, Klein and ‘Stream of Consciousness’ Photography in American Suburb X. http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/06/theory-indecisive-moment-frankklein.html. Accessed: 23/10/14 20 Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004) was a world renown French photographer and founding member of the Magnum photo agency who is best known for his 1952 book ‘The Decisive Moment’. http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_9_VForm&ERID=24KL53ZMYN. Accessed 1/12/14. 21 Gerry Badger. The Genius of Photography: How Photography Has Changed Our Lives (Quadrille

Publishing Limited, London 2008) p.104

picture maker when he set out to make The Americans. Therefore, perhaps a more useful description of Frank’s approach to making photographs at this time would be the ‘improvised 22

moment’ . The term ‘indecisive’ suggests inaccuracy or chance, but in particular relation to Robert Frank, whilst the photographs are certainly intuitive, they are at the same time fully considered. Frank was open to the possibilities of chance encounters or events but also kept in mind the type of photograph that interested him, which meant that the making of each photograph was a considered and deliberate act. As a result, Frank’s work seemed to be a rejection of the formalist constructs of CartierBresson’s style of picture making, opting instead to give primacy to his own poetic vision 23

when making a picture. In 2014 the Danziger Gallery

held a joint exhibition of the work of

both Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank where this contrast formed one of the main focuses of the exhibition. …Each saw the world through the camera they both favoured, the small light Leica. Yet clearly the camera has less to do with their output than the mind behind it. The work of Cartier-Bresson is more cerebral while Frank’s is more emotional. Cartier-Bresson’s compositional interest is harmony while Frank’s is more fractal. Cartier-Bresson tended to observe from a distance while Frank seemed eager to get close to the action... For Frank it was less where he placed himself than how spontaneous he could be. He was consistently moving in, open to possibility, 24 immersing himself in the mystery of the moment. It is worth noting that a number of Frank’s photographs from Peru or The Americans could be deemed, at least on the surface, to have been failures within the critical climate applying at the time at which they were made. Indeed, initial reviews of The Americans were not at all favourable, with one critic famously describing the work as being ‘…flawed by meaningless 25

blur, grain, muddy exposure, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.’

Frank would have been conscious of these so-called flaws, yet the photographs concerned were not edited out of the sequence. Instead he allows the photographs, with their ‘meaningless blur’

and ‘drunken horizons’ , to help foster a new visual language, one that

was distinctly separate from that of his work for Harper’s Bazaar. Perhaps it was experience of the stringent constraints of the visual language that he had to work within back in Zurich or

22 Quote taken from conversation between author and Professor Thomas Joshua Cooper on 4/2/15. See Appendix i for transcript. 23 The Danziger Gallery is a leading photography gallery in based in Chelsea, New York that represents Robert Frank. http://www.danzigergallery.com/gallery. Accessed: 18/11/14 24 Danziger Gallery. The Heart and The Eye Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank in the World. Press release for joint exhibition at Danziger Gallery, New York between 25/1/14 and 22/3/14. http://www.danzigergallery.com/exhibition/the-heart-and-the-eye. Accessed: 18/11/14 25

Lucy Davis. Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ ed by Sarah Greenough in The Telegraph,

23rd May 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/5369489/Looking-In-RobertFranks-The-Americans-ed-by-Sarah-Greenough.html. Accessed: 23/10/14 26 Lucy Davis. Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ ibid 27Lucy Davis. Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ ibid

on assignment in New York that forced Frank to pursue a different path. Regardless, he has never been an artist who felt the need to conform or to play by the rules. Frank himself stated that he went to Peru in order ‘to satisfy my own nature, to be free to work for myself…I didn’t do what I felt would be the correct thing to do, I did what I felt good doing’.

It is precisely this

incessant need to satisfy his own nature that, even to this day, ensures his work is always moving forward.

28 Leo Hsu. Paris Peru in 8 Magazine Issue 24, Autumn 2008 and uploaded to Foto8 online. http://www.foto8.com/live/paris-peru/. Accessed: 1/12/14

Poetry and Performativity in the Photographs and Video Works

At the end of his introduction to The Americans, Jack Kerouac

(1922-1969) describes Frank

as, …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 30 tragic poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes. It should be of no surprise that Frank asked Kerouac to write the introduction to his book, given that for his 1957 novel On the Road

Kerouac had made cross-country road trips

similar to Frank’s for The Americans. Indeed, it can be argued that Frank’s approach to photography shared much more in common with Kerouac and his other friends in the world of poetry and literature than he did with other photographers at that time. Kerouac said in his 32

introduction (sic) ‘anybody doesn’t like these pitchers dont like potry’ . 33

Frank was close to Kerouac and his contemporaries within the Beat Generation , especially 34

the poet Allen Ginsberg , who himself had a keen interest in photography and who shared a long and lasting friendship with Frank. Ginsberg featured in a number of Frank’s films throughout the 1960s and 1970s; most notably Pull My Daisy Brother

(1959) and Me and My

(1965-69). This relationship with poets and poetry would become increasingly

important to Frank’s work moving forward, especially as he began to make more personal films and videos, seeking truth and an understanding of the world around him. It is well documented that shortly after The Americans was published in the United States Robert Frank abandoned photography almost entirely and moved to filmmaking, beginning with Pull My Daisy. This short film, barely half an hour long, was Frank’s first foray into

Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1967) was an American author best known for his 1957 book On the Road.

30 Jack Kerouac. Introduction in The Americans. (Steidl, Göttingen, Germany 2008) un-paginated. 31 ‘On The Road’ was the second and most famous novel by Jack Kerouac. It is a semi-

autobiographical novel that charts Kerouac’s travels around North America with his friend Neal Cassady and serves as definitive record of the experience of the Beat Generation of the 1950s of which he was a key member. In his novel Kerouac perfected what would become known as ‘stream-of-conciousness’ style of writing, or as he described it “spontaneous prose”. First published in 1957 by Viking Press, Inc. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road (Penguin Books Limited, London 2000) 32 Kerouac. Introduction in The Americans. (Steidl, Göttingen, Germany 2008) un-paginated. 33 Allen Ginsberg notes in his prologue to ‘Beat Culture and the New America 1950 – 1965’ describes the term originating in a conversation between John Chellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac where Kerouac said “This is nothing but a beat generation”, referring at once to both the street language of the time where beat meant exhausted or without any money or place to stay and to a literary group of friends who, in Ginsberg’s words “…worked together poetry, prose and cultural conscience from the mid-forties until the term became popular nationally in the mid-fifties.” P.17-18 34 Allen Ginsberg (1926 – 1997) was an American poet best known for his 1955 poem “Howl for Carl Solomon” which was the subject of an obscenity trial in 1957. Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco 2006) 35 Pull my Daisy was Frank’s first foray into filmmaking. Based on a script by Jack Kerouac, which he himself narrates off camera, it has been described by Stefan Grisseman as a “filmic beat poem”. 36 Me and My Brother was Robert Frank’s first full length film which straddles both the documentary and fictional worlds of Julius Orlovsky, brother of poet Peter Orlovsky who was Allen Ginsberg’s partner.

filmmaking and was made in collaboration with Jack Kerouac. The film was based on the third act of a play that Kerouac had written called The Beat Generation. In the short essay ‘Space and Everyday Space,’ Klaus Nüchtern

describes how Frank arrived at filmmaking:

In 1958, Robert Frank began to photograph life in the anonymity of New York City through bus windows. One year after that his photos began to move and the window was opened. But first his camera filmed walls, a picture, furniture, and a refrigerator in slow pans; one view shows a table and some chairs. For the next thirty minutes this apartment becomes a stage and venue. Then a door opens, and the adjoining room 38 is flooded with sunlight. Like a number of Frank’s earliest films, Pull My Daisy follows a loose narrative structure. 39

Narrated off camera by Kerouac himself and filmed in the real-life home of Neal Cassady , the film centres on the arrival of a priest at the home of ‘Milo’. Allen Ginsberg was one of the main characters and, like many other members of the Beat Generation, played a version of himself. Ginsberg described how he and his fellow actors were instructed to ‘follow the script 40

in a very general way’ , insisting that Frank ‘didn’t want us to act, basically.’

Pull My Daisy is lauded as one of the pioneering films of the avant-garde New American Cinema movement, but the numerous self-studies in the years that followed are perhaps more interesting in terms of understanding the role of poetry and performativity in Frank’s work. His wife June Leaf

discussed Frank’s reasons for abandoning photography in favour

of film after The Americans was published: ‘He turned his back and started new…Now, maybe he failed, took risks, but he tried new things. If he had lived off the book, then it would bother him.’

In her essay ‘Circling Beginnings, Continuations, Renewals: Robert Frank’s Personal New American Cinema’ film critic Amy Taubin describes how for Frank ‘movie-making becomes a conversational act’

and that in films such as Me and My Brother Frank deals with ‘life as a

37 Klaus Nüchtern is a German author, cultural critic and deputy chief editor for the Viennese weekly Falter. 38 Klaus Nüchtern. Pull My Daisy in Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank. (Scalo, Zurich-Berlin-New York 2003) p.238 39 Neal Cassady (1926 – 1968) was the inspiration for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s novel ‘On the Road’. 40 Philip Brookman. Conversations with Allen Ginsberg in Frank Films: The Complete Film and Video

Work of Robert Frank. (Scalo, Zurich-Berlin-New York 2003) p.74 41Philip Brookman. Conversations with Allen Ginsberg in Frank Films: The Complete Film and Video Work of Robert Frank. ibid 42 June Leaf is Robert Frank’s second wife. She is an internationally renowned artist who like her husband splits her time between New York and Nova Scotia. 43Charlie LeDuff. Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey in Vanity Fair, April 2008. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/04/frank200804 Accessed 12/1/15 44 Amy Taubin. Circling Beginings, Continuations, Renewals: Robert Frank’s Personal New American Cinema in Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank. (Scalo, Zurich-Berlin-New York 2003) p.100

performative act.’

This notion of Frank attempting to understand life through the

performative media of photography and filmmaking is fundamental to understanding almost all of the work Frank has made from the 1970s onward. It is perhaps necessary to define precisely what the term ‘performativity’ means in relation to Frank’s work. In his seminal book on photography Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes described his experience of the moment a photograph is taken: In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art…the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of paranthesis): I am 46 truly becoming a specter. Barthes’ account of having his portrait taken eloquently describes the transformation of the photographic subject into the photographic object, which also describes precisely the performative character of the photographic event itself. Just as is the case with photography, film has this transformative power over its subjects. Throughout his films, Frank utilises this transformative power in relation to the world around him in order to create an existential space for himself and for his subjects. Whether making films or photographs, for Frank the camera acts as an instrument for creating or finding truth and this is where the core performativity in Frank’s work lies. Catherine Grant described the performative possibilities of the camera in her essay The Performance Space of the Photograph, saying that: …The photograph’s potential for documentation is played with as being not simply a window, but a site of fantasy that requires the viewer’s complicity in believing and 47 constructing the scene being viewed. Whilst Grant was talking specifically about the works of Robert Smithson (1938 – 1973), this applies equally to our reading of Frank’s more direct and very often diaristic films and videos. Whilst on the surface they seem to be straight documents and ruminations of his experience, Frank is often found to be complicit in creating scenarios in order to observe the consequences. Whilst he might not directly instruct those who appear in his films, he certainly constructs the conditions under which the action might occur. In Conversations in Vermont (1969) Frank begins to explore autobiographical subject matter, 48

and Taubin notes that this ‘has subsequently dominated his work for over thirty years.’

The

45 Amy Taubin. Circling Beginings, Continuations, Renewals: Robert Frank’s Personal New American Cinema in Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank. ibid p.96 46 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. (Vintage, London 2000) p.14 47 Grant, Catherine. The Performance Space of the Photograph: From ‘The Anti-Photographers’ to ‘The Directorial Mode’ in re:bus, Issue 5, 2010. p.8. http://www.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/research/pdfs/rebus_issue_5/Grant.pdf. Accessed 16/1/15

film centres on Frank visiting his children Pablo and Andrea at an alternative boarding school in Vermont. Frank questions his children about their memories and experiences of growing up, of family life and of their relationship with him. Throughout the film we are presented with close-ups of photographic contact sheets and old prints of his children and then-wife Mary, some of which he brought with him to Vermont. This inclusion of old photographs is telling, as unlike his previous films

Frank worked on this one

almost entirely on his own. Conversations in Vermont is Frank’s first autobiographical and independently made film, whereas previously he had worked with scripts written by others or else collaborated with others in producing films. It should be of no surprise that he begins the film looking at old photographs, something that would be much more familiar to him than working with film, that is to say that it makes sense that when an artist doesn’t know what to do he does what comes naturally to him. Furthermore, it is worth noting that Frank’s sole reason for visiting his children was to make the film. This is not documentary footage of a father visiting his children at boarding school, but rather a film in which Frank, very much in artistic mode, probes and questions his children in an attempt to answer his own questions. Very often Frank himself is filmed questioning his children, attempting to ‘communicate with them by means of a shared story, to open up a 50

space for joint memory.’

Frank asks short, sometimes open-ended questions in a bid to

allow the individual characters of his children to emerge. This relationship with his children features prominently in much of his subsequent works, both photographic and film, though later in his career his focus is much more melancholic and often regretful. The strained and difficult way his children were brought up, which he acknowledged, is the focus of much of Frank’s interaction with his son and Frank acknowledges in the film that: It got more difficult the older you got, we got more apart… looking all over these photographs, I do realise how tight Mary and I were about living our way and not 51 giving into the children any which way… By combining candid and often frank conversations with the possibilities afforded by semiconstructed narrative devices (such as the sequences with the photographs), Frank creates the right conditions for performative and documentary elements of this work to coalesce. Frank makes reference throughout to the fact that he is making a film: often he himself is filmed holding the microphone, other times speaking directly to the camera operator or on one

48 Taubin, Amy. Circling Beginings, Continuations, Renewals: Robert Frank’s Personal New American Cinema in Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank. (Scalo, Zurich-Berlin-New York 2003) p.98 49 Pull My Daisy (1959), The Sin of Jesus (1961), OK End Here (1963) and to a somewhat lesser extent Me and My Brother (1965-69) 50 Isabella Reicher. Family Album in Frank Films: The Complete Film and Video Work of Robert Frank. (Scalo, Zurich-Berlin-New York 2003) p.246 51 Quote from Conversations in Vermont 16mins 30s

occasion stating to Andrea that he managed to get ‘a good take with Pablo’ . Frank openly lists his intentions and hopes for the film in the opening segments and periodically throughout the course of the film. As a result the viewer can be left in no doubt about what we are watching; they are, if not directly instructed, then at least constructed scenes. In his book Introduction to Documentary, film critic Bill Nichols discusses the performative possibilities of filmmaking, stating: Performative documentaries primarily address us, emotionally and expressively, rather than pointing us to the factual world we hold in common. These films engage us less with rhetorical commands or imperatives than with a sense of their own vivid 53 responsiveness. The filmmaker’s responsiveness seeks to animate our own. It is precisely Frank’s own responsiveness, especially in films such as Conversations in Vermont, which helps solidify the importance of performativity in his work. Perhaps one of the more complex examples of the performative elements within Robert Frank’s work is his first full-length film is Me and My Brother, a complicated docu-fiction that is often frustratingly difficult and awkward yet is occasionally revelatory in terms of Frank’s process and attempts to ‘obtain, via fiction, certainty about himself.’

Frank notes

The world which I am a part includes Julius Orlovsky. Julius is a catatonic, a silent man…sounds and images pass him and no reaction comes from him. In the course 55 of the film he becomes like all other people in front of my camera – an actor. The film that would become Me and My Brother was originally planned to be about Allen Ginsberg’s 1961 prose poem Kaddish, which detailed the poet’s mother and her terrible battle with schizophrenia and mental illness, but they were unable to gain financial support for the project. George Kouvaros, professor of cinema studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia, describes in his essay ‘He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother’ that, despite these initial setbacks, Frank’s time spent working on the film ‘sowed the seeds for 56

another project with striking similarities to Ginsberg’s’ . Kouvaros goes on to state how ‘for fifteen years, Julius Orlovsky, the brother of Ginsberg’s partner, Peter Orlovsky, had been a psychiatric patient’

and ‘was released from hospital in the care of his brother.’

The ensuing

52 ibid 14mins 38s 53 Bill Nichols. Introduction to Documetary. http://www.quintadimensao.net/loop/data/air/UE/Bill%20Nichols%20%20%20Introduction%20to%20documentary.pdf Accessed 16/2/15 54 Stefan Grisseman. Chaos Theory in Frank Films: The Complete Film and Video Work of Robert Frank. (Scalo, Zurich-Berlin-New York 2003) p.244 55 George Kouvaros. He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother in Screening the Past, Issue 29. http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/29/robert-frank-me-and-my-brother.html Accessed 19/1/15 56 George Kouvaros. He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother in Screening the Past, Issue 29. ibid 57 George Kouvaros. He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother in Screening the Past, Issue

29. ibid

film is an experimental semi-fiction with multiple layers of false narrative woven throughout. This is somewhat through necessity as half way through filming Julius goes missing, so ‘in order to deal with the difficulties posed by Julius’ behaviour and secure additional funding’

Frank cast Joseph Chaiken (1935 – 2003) as Julius in his absence. One of the opening titles of the film reads: ‘in this film all the events and people are real. Whatever is unreal is purely my imagination.’

This serves to alert the audience to the

filmmaking process and, as Kouvaros described it, ‘encourages reflection on its construction and effects.’

The ensuing film is simultaneously difficult and rewarding.

Though much can be read into the multi-faceted fictionalised narratives that run concurrent with the disjointed observations and interventions with (the real) Julius, some of the most powerful performative exchanges occur while Julius is filmed engaging with the world. Early in the film Peter recites a letter he received from the hospital detailing his brother’s condition. We learn from the letter that Julius had worked for the New York Sanitation department previous to his first psychotic episode: He was masturbating while on duty. He became excited, violently resistive, and was transferred to the Kings County State Hospital…He received shock treatment. 63 Diagnosis was schizophrenic – catatonic type. Julius remains almost entirely silent throughout, appearing sporadically in sem-fictional scenes, metanarratives and interventions. Frank described the difficulty and failures of the film some years later: I should have just accepted what was there and not try to make it into something else…. I really tried to twist it into a shape that I felt the film needed in order to be a full-length film. And now, if I was to re-edit the film or redo it, I would let it be the way 64 the footage came out and not try to over-edit it or force it into telling a specific story. The acknowledgement that parts of the film were forced is a fair observation and indeed the most successful and interesting points in the film are the simpler observations or interventions

58 Kouvaros, George. He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother in Screening the Past, Issue 29. http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/29/robert-frank-me-and-my-brother.html Accessed 19/1/15 59 George Kouvaros. He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother in Screening the Past, Issue 29. ibid 60 Joseph Chaiken was an American actor, theatre director and playwright and founder of The Open Theater, an expiremental theatre group in New York in 1963. 61 Quote from opening sequence from Me and My Brother 62 George Kouvaros. He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother in Screening the Past, Issue

29. http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/29/robert-frank-me-and-my-brother.html Accessed 19/1/15 63 Quote from Me and My Brother 27mins 30secs

64 George Kouvaros. He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother in Screening the Past, Issue

29. http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/29/robert-frank-me-and-my-brother.html Accessed 19/1/15

with Julius himself rather than the fabricated metanarratives. Frank’s strength as a filmmaker is his ability to observe and reflect, creating the right conditions in order to draw out profound exchanges with his subjects. In terms of performativity however, it is Frank’s own exchanges with Julius that occur late on in the film that are of key importance. Shot very soon after Julius reappeared following a period of time in hospital, their exchanges are perhaps the most revelatory in terms of demonstrating Frank’s innate ability to create the conditions for the inherent performative possibilities to be realised. The final scene of the film is a direct interaction between Frank and Julius, who after receiving shock treatment while hospitalised had by this point begun to speak. Frank begins by loosely questioning him about his shock treatment and when he merely instructs Julius to ‘say something’ to the camera, Julius replies with what Allen Ginsberg described as ‘an astoundingly conscious answer.’

Well, the camera is a …seems like a—reflection of disapproval or disgust or— disappointment or unhelpfulness—ness, or …unexplainability—to disclose any real, 66 real truth that might possibly exist. Frank goes on to ask Julius where it is that truth exists, and his answer shares similarities with some of Frank’s own musings in later films: Inside and outside—the world. Outside the world is—well—I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a theory, an idea or a theory is all we can arrive at—a theory or an explanation— 67 to the matter—whatever you concern yourself with. This answer reveals much about Frank’s intentions with his films and videos. Just as was the case with The Americans, Frank’s own presence is confined to the periphery of many of his early films. The artist himself is very often present only in a limited way, for example a voice from behind the camera, a reflection in a mirror or a hand in front of a window. This is a device that is carried into his subsequent photographic work, his voice replaced with scratched texts on his negatives. The work is deeply personal yet the fragmentary natures of his films are self-reflexive, despite the subject matters. The camera allows Frank to remain somewhat removed from the film he makes. Works like Life Dances On (1980) and Home Improvements (1985) question the limits of the photograph, despite the fact that Frank is not concerned with aesthetic perfection in terms of 68

the visual structure of his films, a quality that was described as his ‘weak strength’

French filmmaker and critic Jean-Paul Fargier. Fargier also described Frank’s cinematic style

Quote from Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank 20mins 20secs

66 Quote from Me and My Brother 1hr 35mins 67 ibid 1hr 36mins

68 Christa Blümlinger. A Film in the Subjunctive Tense in Frank Films: The Complete Film and Video

Work of Robert Frank. (Scalo, Zurich-Berlin-New York 2003) p.256

as being like ‘action painting…shooting first and asking questions later’ , which is consistent with the approach of many of his contemporaries in the Beat Generation. As is the case with Conversations in Vermont, the strength of Life Dances On is the intuitive exchanges between Frank and his subject matter. In the same way as for many of his subsequent photographs, Frank uses the camera as a poetic device. Fellow filmmaker Maya Deren (1917 – 1961), a pioneer of avant-garde film and New American Cinema in her own right, describes the poetic possibilities of filmmaking: …It probes the ramifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned in a sense not with what is occurring, but with what it feels like or what it means, A poem to my mind, creates visible or auditory forms for something which is invisible, which is the feeling, or the emotion, or the 70 metaphysical content of the movement. Deren notes also that another distinction of poetry within filmmaking is its ‘vertical 71

investigation of a situation,’

which is to say that it is not concerned with linear narrative or

what is being presented on the screen. Rather, this ‘vertical investigation’ literally plunges the viewer into the core of the subject, so the work is not driven by the ‘horizontal attack of 72

drama’ . Deren maintains instead that poetry and the poetic possibilities within cinema are irrevocably tied to ‘an approach to experience’.

This especially is true of Frank’s films as

they are not concerned with narrative but crucially with his own innate questioning of the world in search for some kind of truth. Much like with his photographs, Frank is not always concerned with the events unfolding directly in front of him but rather with what these scenes might be able to suggest in broader terms. Frank’s wife described his work as being like a man with chopsticks: ‘…He watches and 74

watches and then…just picks the most lasting essential thing out of the chaos’

and that

does seem the most apt description. Frank’s films are often chaotic, difficult and frustratingly oblique. On occasion, however, he finds the ‘lasting essential thing’ of which his wife speaks. In a number of his later video works Frank uses the diaristic possibilities of the video camera to articulate thoughts and considerations that cannot be communicated so directly through photographs alone. That the video camera allows Frank to assert his own voice in the work, literally and figuratively, may help with understanding the prevalence of handwritten text on

69 Jonathan Rosenbaum. 60s Wisdom in The Reader, August 11th 1988.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/60s-wisdom/Content?oid=872586 Accessed: 28/1/15 70 Maya Deren. Poetry and Film: A Symposium in Film Culture, No.29 1963 p.55-63 http://www.virtual-circuit.org/word/pages/Poetry/Symposium_Poetry.html Accessed: 20/1/15 71Maya Deren. Poetry and Film: A Symposium in Film Culture, No.29 1963 p.55-63 http://www.virtual-circuit.org/word/pages/Poetry/Symposium_Poetry.html Accessed: 20/1/15 72 Maya Deren. Poetry and Film: A Symposium in Film Culture, No.29 ibid 73 Maya Deren. Poetry and Film: A Symposium in Film Culture, No.29 ibid 74 Quote from Coming Home, Leaving Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank 19mins 8secs

photographs upon his return to photography in the 1970s. Frank himself spoke of the differences between photography and filmmaking: ‘You’re just an observer; you just walk around, and there’s no need to communicate. Whereas with films it becomes more 75

complicated—thinking in long durations and keeping up a kind of sequence'.

Notions of sequential imagery and direct communication became two key elements in Frank’s photographic work moving forward, beginning with The Lines of My Hand in 1972. For the first time in Frank’s work we see the clear and direct influence of his forays into filmmaking in terms of the physical structuring of his photographs and the creation of photographic objects. Frank began working with large format Polaroid film that gave him both a positive instant print and a negative from which to work. It was during these experiments with Polaroid’s that Frank began scratching words directly onto his negatives and combining written text and photographs for the first time. When asked about the emergence of serialism on his return to photography in the 1970s, Frank stated that: ‘That’s a direct influence, I think, from the movies, once I started to make movies. I certainly didn’t think about the single photographs anymore. Not very much.’

His work also moved from the streets to his studios in Nova Scotia and New York, where he created still life’s and photographic constructs that share a focus on his relationships with his children, particularly following the death of his daughter Andrea and his son Pablo’s battles with drug addiction and mental health issues, subjects that would continue into his films of the 1980s. When asked by fellow photographer and filmmaker Marlaine Glicksman which of his films was closest to him, Frank named his 1980 film Life Dances On. Frank described the performative qualities of the film, which centred around his son Pablo, his friend and struggling artist Marty 77

Greenbaum and Billy, ‘a bum I got to know on the street:’

I felt that each one of these three people was walking on the edge. And that’s what made the film. And it also had these references to my daughter, and I was always in it. It was always me who forced these people to talk, who made them talk about themselves or expose themselves in a way, I didn’t hide that interference and that brutality that pushes a filmmaker to get something out of people… Probably I didn’t know then how I fit into this, how I found myself in the centre of these three people with whom I had different relations. I never said that before, but I think that’s what

75 George Kouvaros. He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother in Screening the Past, Issue 29. http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/29/robert-frank-me-and-my-brother.html Accessed 19/1/15 76 Marilane Glicksman. Highway ’61 Revisited in Film Comment, August 1987. Transcribed and uploaded to American Suburb X. http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/02/interview-robert-frankhighway-61-revisited-1987.html Accessed 26/1/15 77 Marilane Glicksman. Highway ’61 Revisited in Film Comment, August 1987 ibid

interested me- – pure intuition, I didn’t plan on this. I didn’t make a point of this in the 78 film. The film consists almost entirely of footage of Frank interacting with or observing his subjects, creating situations in which he is able to illicit a response from a subject or initiating situations that allow him to observe at a distance. Some of the most interesting and profound exchanges occur with Billy, who clearly has mental health issues and seems obsessively worried about people reading his mind. Frank’s interest in those at the very fringes of society is something that has been present since his work in The Americans, when he photographed the black Americans in the segregated South and transvestites in New York. Billy, Julius Orlovsky in Me and My Brother and his own son Pablo are key characters in his films and photographs that occupy this fringe position. Despite the seemingly documentary nature of many of Frank’s films, especially in the works made in the 1970s and 1980s after The Lines of My Hand was published, Frank was initiating and orchestrating, at least to some extent, the events and context of his work. Frank is no longer the lone photographer stalking the streets, observing life as it occurred around him but rather he is fully complicit in his work, asserting himself and engaging directly with what is going on within the films and photographs. It is telling that, in reference to making films, Frank noted in The Lines of My Hand that ‘There is no decisive moment, it’s got to be created. I’ve 79

got to do everything to make it happen in front of the lens.’

Whilst Frank’s intuition continues

to be central to his work, his own complicity within it adding a new dimension to his films and photographic work moving forward. It is worth pointing out that in many of Frank’s films he re-uses or re-constitutes scenes from his previous works and that a number of his films also feature his photographs, some dating back to his time in Peru. In the 1989 Parkett/Der Alltag edition of The Lines of My Hand the first half of the book functions as a retrospective look at Frank’s career to date, chronicling his travels from Switzerland to America, Peru and London before beginning The Americans. It features many works reprised from his earliest books as well as a number of previously unpublished works from the earliest period of his career and a number of stills from his films such as Pull my Daisy, Me and My Brother and Cocksucker Blues (1972). Frank often maintains that he is an artist interested only in moving forward, which makes the recycling aspect of his work seem somewhat contradictory. The stylistic shift between the earlier work and the film stills that he chose to include in The Lines of My Hand tells us a great deal about the effect filmmaking had on Frank’s approach to

78 Marilane Glicksman. Highway ’61 Revisited in Film Comment, August 1987 ibid 79 Robert Frank. The Lines of My Hand (PARKETT / DER ALLTAG Publishers Ltd, Zurich, 1989), un-paginated.

making photographs thereafter. Indeed, the distinction between ‘making photographs’ and ‘taking photographs’ is vital when considering Frank’s return to photography in The Lines of My Hand. Photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper explained this important difference in terminology when talking about making photographs in an interview at the Centro de Arte y Naturaleza in Huesca, Spain: ‘It is a considered event and a considered action, and through that consideration the act of construction occurs…I never take anything…I make something, I originate it.’

Whilst Cooper is speaking with reference to his own artistic practice, this can also be applied to Robert Frank’s photographic works, especially the Polaroid collages and altered negatives that constitute much of the second half of The Lines of My Hand. Frank’s Polaroid work perhaps gives the best example of the stylistic shift in terms of photography on his return to the medium in the 1970s. Just as was the case with many of his films, the highly constructed Polaroid pictures that first appear in The Lines of My Hand cement the core role of performativity and, perhaps most importantly, poetry within his work. Photographs such as 4am Make Love to Me, Battleboro, Vermont, December 24, 1979 (fig.4), of which Frank has created a number of versions, could be considered as a work of poetry in its own right. The text is both scratched into the negative and written on the print. The fact that the words are repeated in ink above those permanently etched into the negative suggests a lyrical cadence or musical phrasing that could serve almost as a mantra. It is important to note that Frank’s inclusion of language is added to the photograph, rather than being an inherent component of the picture itself. Frank works with short phrases or words, rarely more than a sentence long, that serve both as a means for the viewer to enter into the pictures themselves but also as his own utterances, a rare articulation of the artist’s own voice. As evidenced by his conversations with his children in Conversations in Vermont, Frank was able, through his life as an artist, to create a distance between him and what was happening around him. That distance, when combined with the tough and reserved nature of his Swiss-German heritage makes these utterances even more important in relation to the works in the latter half of The Lines of My Hand. Cooper also noted Frank’s ‘hard, Swiss 81

German character’ , his reluctance to engage with the fame that followed the success of The Americans and the contrast between emotional and open quality of Frank’s later work. That Cooper also pointed to the awkward opening exchanges between Frank and his daughter Andrea in the opening scenes of Conversations in Vermont serves as further evidence for this hard edge.

80 Quote from ‘Exposición: True de Thomas Joshua Cooper’, 1min 18s. Uploaded to Youtube th

November 17 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifzatCLgTZs Accessed: 2/2/15 81 Quote taken from conversation between author and Professor Thomas Joshua Cooper on 4/2/15.

See Appendix ii for transcript.

Whereas previously in works such as Peru or The Americans the body of photographs as a whole was the work, the Polaroid’s in Lines of My Hand, to my mind at least, function as standalone works in and of themselves. Photographs such as Blind/Love/Faith, Mabou 1981 (fig.5) or Sick of Goodbyes, Mabou 1978 (fig.6) are other examples of works that constitute a type of visual photographic poetry, where the inclusion of what sits within the frame of the viewfinder of the camera and the addition of text and language merge to make the work. It is worth noting that ostensibly The Americans was an easier work to make than The Lines of My Hand, at least in terms of subject matter. Where The Americans dealt with the world around Frank as he found it, The Lines of My Hand dealt with life as it happened to Frank and as he experienced it directly. Frank’s informal use of the camera, which originated in The Americans, truly found its form in The Lines of My Hand. Despite often working with large format Polaroid cameras in his studio, there is still a lithe presence of the artist’s hand, though this time it is the paint brush rather than the lightweight Leica that immerses the artist within the work. Much of the poetic and performative possibilities within the latter work in The Lines of My Hand derive from, as Deren would describe it, the vertical nature of the subject matter. Frank literally plunges the viewer into his life and, perhaps more importantly, his psychological space. Works such as For Andrea, 1975 (fig.7) physically highlight the emotional toll of loss and perhaps even regret that Frank felt in relation to the death of his daughter. The damaged surface of the photographs suggests on one level the fading of memory whilst the inclusion of ‘I think of Andrea every day’ and the partially obscured text that appears to read ‘Not keeping diary now things are better’ suggest Frank’s battle with his own psyche. Andrea’s face makes up less than half of a single panel of the nine-panel work and the fact that just under half of the panels are left blank adds to this feeling of fleeting memories. Frank made a number of works that were directed or dedicated to his daughter. It is telling, though not necessarily surprising, that when it came to his son Pablo, Frank made him the overt subject rather than refer to him less directly. A number of his films explicitly scrutinized their relationship as father and son in a way that was much harsher and less oblique than the works relating to his daughter. This may be in part because Frank had a much longer and troubled relationship with Pablo

and because of the sudden nature of Andrea’s death. Even

in early works like Conversations in Vermont, however, the difference between his relationship with son and that with daughter was clearly evident. Frank finishes the PARKETT/ALLTAG edition of The Lines of My Hand with a simplified version of a photograph of a snow-covered chopping block with the hazy lines of the Northumberland Strait splitting the image almost in half. It is an image that he has reprised

Andrea Frank died in 1974 aged 21 and Pablo Frank died in 1994 aged 43

several times subsequently, both in films and photographs. The version that appears two pages earlier, however, is perhaps the most profound example of Frank’s photographic poetry (fig.8). The words ‘Hold Still, Keep Going’ are scrawled over the same image, straddling both the photograph itself and the grey background on which Frank has affixed the print. Described as ‘the most important photographic picture of the late twentieth century’ perhaps more importantly ‘the great clarion call of the millennium’,

and

the photograph is

perhaps Frank’s most singular work of poetry within the medium of photography. In Coming Home, Leaving Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank, Frank himself alludes to the poetic possibilities of a singular work of photography: I wanted to say what it feels like to be here, how does it feel, y’know? If you make movies you point your camera at somebody else, y’know, you make the story. But being here alone, you have to…you have to sort of create something that will show maybe in one photograph or two photographs how it feels to be here.

It seems to me that Hold Still, Keep Going is Frank’s attempt to reconcile himself with his immediate past and a seemingly uncertain present. That the work exists in different versions and is reprised in different forms, both still photographs and video screen captures in The Lines of My Hand and later works, suggests that the work might act as a mantra for Frank himself as well as his audience. I would argue that it epitomises and encapsulates all of the poetic and performative possibilities of Frank’s work in a single image.

83 Quote from the ‘The World’s End: The Atlantic Basin Project’ 1h 24mins 44secs. th

Uploaded to Vimeo

24 October 2008. http://vimeo.com/63318647. Accessed 9/2/15 84 ibid 1h 26mins 54secs

The Visual Diaries and Beyond One of the opening photographs in the 2010 book Tal Uf Tal Ab is of a newsstand in Switzerland where, among the magazine and newspaper headlines and titles, there is the unmistakable face of President Barack Obama (fig. 9). Conversely, one of the final photographs in the book is a somewhat hazy and blurred portrait of Jack Kerouac (fig. 10), standing with his shirt open holding a suitcase against a backdrop of a wooden house, the whiteness of his shirt mirroring that of the house itself. Throughout the book Frank employs such shifts in time, situating photographs of old friends long gone with quieter photographs of the everyday and pictures of those closest to him today: his wife June Leaf and his current friends and neighbours. The opening photograph (fig.11) of an in store discount sign ‘The Big Deal 97¢’ suggests something of Frank’s approach to making and using photographs; he is not now precious or fragile about his work, not that he ever really was. That sign, suspended from the ceiling by chains and flanked either side by fluorescent strip lighting, is reminiscent of some of Frank’s earliest work from The Americans. Photographs such as ‘En Route from New York to Washington, Club Car’ (fig. 12), which shows three men with their heads bowed and shoulders hunched in conversation and with strip lights flanking the frame and tapering off toward an array of tiny stars, or the moonlit road of ‘U.S. 285, New Mexico’ (fig. 13), that stretches long into the night, the tyre tracks well worn and lighter than the asphalt that forces the eye to follow deep into the horizon, share similar visual structures to that of the discount sign that opens the book. However this newer picture of the store sign is much simpler, almost humbler in its intention and is much more successful as a result of that. This newer photograph still shares in all the inquisitiveness of those earlier pictures, but it does not feel as heavy. Frank has no point to prove and he is not concerned with satisfying any other need than his own when making these pictures. Several of these seemingly transcendental pictures in the later books seem to be about Frank’s own experience of making photographs. He is not trying to offer us as viewers, or to indulge himself in, anything other than this experience of pure looking. 85

This book, like each of the four ‘visual diaries’

published almost annually since 2010, is

made up of photographs of friends, interiors, everyday objects and sparse, cryptic writings. Even to this day, Frank is not giving anything away, rather allowing the photographs to speak for themselves. Just as with The Americans, Frank employs little to no captioning of his work; the occasional name of a person or place appears but little else. Similar again to The

85 Tal Uf Tal Ab (2010), You Would (2012) Park/Sleep (2013), Household Inventory Record (2013) and Partida (2014) are the titles published to date that comprise what has become known as Frank’s series of ‘visual diaries’.

Americans, regular themes and symbols recur; photographs of doorways, picture and window frames appear over and over. Photographs of the sky and the shoreline appear in almost every book. This visual continuity works as a kind of performative modus operandi, binding the books together in such a way that they can be viewed independently or as one larger, extended body of work. The small photographic series of three colour photographs of the sky (fig. 14) that appear near the end of Partida (2014) provides an interesting example of performative qualities within these late works. Not unlike a series of film stills, Frank repeatedly photographs this skyline as the perfectly white clouds encroach upon the brilliant blue sky and appear above the treeline. In his interview with Philip Brookman, Allen Ginsberg noted that one of the qualities that most drew him to Frank was that, like Kerouac, ‘they both had this spontaneity, an 86

allowance of accidents…’ . Ginsberg went on to note that ‘…the thing I liked most in Robert’s work, his helplessness for the actual fact of chance, and his acceptance of that, and his 87

willingness to include that.’

The combination of the subtlety of the blue sky against the near pure white clouds and the repeated exposure, arranged and composed so as to appear as three nearly identical photographs, suggests passage of time and the simplistic nature of almost subconscious gazing. This feeling of time passing is particularly prevalent and pertinent throughout these diaries and also in a readymade entitled ‘Household Inventory Record’, in which another version of the cloud work appears (fig. 15), this time as a single image set against a black picture on the opposite page with scratched text that reads ‘Porque? Quel Dia?’ meaning ‘Why? This day?’ (fig.16). A third almost identical version of this work appears in Frank’s 2009 publication ‘Seven Stories’, this time as a single Polaroid picture, the clouds tinged red by the setting sun (fig.17). Frank’s combination of archival and previously unseen, perhaps even entirely new photographs create a sombre and reflective tone and this should not be surprising. Given the tone and subject matter of much of Frank’s work, beginning specifically with The Lines of My Hand, and the fact he is now ninety years old, there is a definite feeling that Frank is an artist nearing the end of his career. Whilst this is a somewhat sobering thought when looking at some of the pictures, this does not mean that he is simply going through the motions and churning out works for the sake of it. There is still a definite sense that Frank is continually striving to arrive at new places within his work, constantly moving forward even when he is looking back. Whilst he is perhaps less overtly radical now in his later years than he was in

86 Philip Brookman. Conversations with Allen Ginsberg in Frank Films: The Complete Film and Video Work of Robert Frank. (Scalo, Zurich-Berlin-New York 2003) p.74 87 Philip Brookman. Conversations with Allen Ginsberg in Frank Films: The Complete Film and Video Work of Robert Frank ibid

his youth, his intention to continually move forward with his work persists and there is still something of his famously restless spirit that exists within the photographs. Frank has become increasingly more prosaic in terms of how he makes pictures, opting instead for a directness that is at once poetic, often gestural, but without ever being didactic. These notions are reflected by some of Frank’s own musings throughout the books: I suppose my photographs are of things I don’t want to forget My instinct tells me that they are important They are quiet They demand no attention 88 They are not empty These last three lines are particularly pertinent. In them, Frank has described the essential qualities of these photographs. These reflective, seemingly simplistic photographs are not the loaded, genre-defining images of The Americans, nor are they the emotionally charged, morose Polaroid’s of The Lines of My Hand. Frank is an artist who is not content with a single style or vision, but instead he continues to work according to his own intuition, moving his work forward though perhaps now somewhat more slowly now than in his youth. Whilst this new work can be seen to share some of the hallmarks of earlier works, there is something distinctly refreshing in these newer pictures. That some of the photographs in these books are in colour should be noted, given that he is said to have declared that black and white are the colours of photography. Frank’s colour pictures, especially the Polaroid’s that make up his seven-book collection Seven Stories (2009), suggest the same sleight-ofhand style of picture making as when he worked with his small, lightweight Leica in the 1950s. The works in Seven Stories are collected in seven separate flipbooks containing mixtures of portraits of his wife and friends as well as photographs of his immediate environment. It appears from the photographs that the small, hand-held Polaroid format and the instant nature of the material allow Frank to make photographs that are intuitive and that encapsulate all of the poetic and performative qualities of Frank’s work. Much like the visual diaries, Frank often makes similar types of photographs repeatedly (figs. 18–19), creating and sustaining motifs and a visual language that has become well established throughout these late works. In Tal Uf Tal Ab there is a photograph of a set of three doors taken at his home in Mabou. In Frank’s 2004/2008 film True Story (fig. 20) there is a significant moment in the film where Frank reads out a letter he received about photography. That this portion of the film is filmed looking at these three same doors cannot be underestimated. Much like the series of cloud and sky photographs, that these doors are reprised several times suggests a certain type of potency within the imagery.

88 Frank, Robert. Park/Sleep (Steidl, Göttingen, Germany 2013) un-paginated.

Why is it then that these new book works, which have been published steadily since 2010, have gone largely unnoticed? Much of the critical attention paid to Frank’s work still centres around The Americans and, to a lesser degree, The Lines of My Hand. Did the difficult subject matter of Frank’s later photographs and videos create a barrier around the work? Or did the seemingly almost intentional sloppiness and difficult way Frank chose to make his films ensure that, save for one or two of his earliest works, his films and videos remained underground and in obscurity? th

On the occasion of the 50 Anniversary of The Americans being published, Gerhard Steidl began The Robert Frank Project, an earnest attempt to bring Frank’s earliest, lesser-seen bookworks, films, videos and newer works to the world. Frank’s work had been seemingly absent from the public domain, save for a few retrospectives beginning in 1994 with Moving Out at the exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington. Frank’s largely self-imposed exile from the art world began shortly after The Americans began to receive critical acclaim, ‘…people would come by or send me photographs and they looked like my photographs. Then I realized there was no more point. I wanted to move on.’

Frank was not willing to play

along with the fine art market either, famously opting to destroy a set of vintage prints from The Americans that he’d bought off a dealer. He was so furious that someone was making money off his pictures. He was cursing at him as he was drilling…destroying thousands of dollars' worth of pictures…Frank later decided that he liked this pile of donut prints, wrapped wire around the bundle and fastened it to a piece of plywood…he created the fearsome "Mute/ Blind" in 1989. He presented it to his art dealer on the opening of his new gallery - Frank's 90 comment on the New York art world. It seems obvious that much of the reason Frank’s work after The Americans fell out of the critical limelight was due to the intensely difficult and personal subject matter that he addresses through his films and photographs. The socio-political problems portrayed in The th

Americans seem to be far easier to place within the wider canon of 20 century photography than the difficult, autobiographical and reflexive nature of the work that followed his return to the medium. In many respects Frank was ahead of his time and, as is so often the case, overlooked. The intensely personal issues that Frank wrestled with through his photographs beginning with his polaroid work and his films paved the way for the generation of confessional, diaristic photographers that followed, Nan Goldin

(b.1953) being an obvious

example.

89 Richard B. Woodward. Where Have You Gone, Robert Frank? in The New York Times, September th

4 1994. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/04/magazine/where-have-you-gone-robertfrank.html?src=pm&pagewanted=3 Accessed 16/2/15 90Richard B. Woodward. Where Have You Gone, Robert Frank? in The New York Times, ibid 91 Nan Goldin is an American photographer best know for her visual diary The Ballad of Sexual

Dependency, which chronicled her most intimate relationships and those of her closest friends. First published in 1986, Goldin described the work as being about ‘Real memory, which these pictures

Duane Michals

(b.1932) is a photographer whose work shares some similarities with Frank

in terms of poetic and performative elements, coupled with his inclusion of hand-written or painted text. Like Frank, Michals is not precious about the material, rejecting as Frank did the notion of the ‘decisive moment’. Much like Frank, Michals’ work often employs sequencing and text in order to make apparent the poetic and performative aspects of the work. Michals described the role of poetry within photography as being ‘…the indelible, (sic) undescribable part that we respond to. In fact any work you can describe to a tee why it looks interesting is 93

not poetic to me.’

Though perhaps more obliquely than The Lines of My Hand, the photographs within Tal Uf Tal Ab, You Would, Park/Sleep, and Partida continue in this same poetic vein, though less immediately emotionally charged than before. Only Frank’s 2013 offering, Household Inventory Record, comes close to the emotive currency of The Lines of My Hand. Indeed, alternative versions of works such as Blind/Love/Faith, Mabou 1981 (fig. 21) from The Lines of My Hand appear in Household Inventory Record. Of all of the latterly published works this is arguably the most singular and unique in its vision and execution. It seemingly picks up where The Lines of My Hand left off, opening with a revised version of Frank’s 1998 Polaroid collage The War is Over (fig.22). The newer version (fig. 23), which is much darker in tone both aesthetically and subjectively, is a direct continuation of the photographs Frank presented at the end of The Lines of My Hand. Other works, such as September 2001 (fig. 24) deal much more with the present. These two Polaroid self-portraits are very obviously Frank’s response to the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001. That the poetic potency of Frank’s work is not solely reserved for his own personal past shows that he is an artist who remains current and relevant. It seems apparent that the difficult emotional currency that Frank’s work deals in is one of the reasons, coupled with his own reluctance to be thrust in the limelight, that important works like this have remained largely under the radar of contemporary photographic critique. That Frank was ahead of his time when he published The Americans and The Lines of My Hand can be in no doubt. I would argue that the same is true of these late works. Frank has made a career of staying ahead of the photographic norm, working earnestly and often independently in order to push the medium and the material to its very edges, continually questioning its relationship with the world in order to attempt to answer his own questions about a long and difficult life.

trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life.’ http://aperture.org/shop/books/nan-goldin-the-ballad-of-sexual-dependency-book Accessed 20/2/15 92 Duane Michals is an American photographer whose expressionistic, constructed photographs helped redefine the parameters of role of the photograph within contemporary art, helping establish a lyrical and poetic mode that is in keeping with that of Robert Frank. 93 Quote taken from A Fire In the East, 11mins 40 secs.

Household Inventory Record is a clear example of this continual questioning. Given the unusual format of the book - it is long and slender, with narrow vertical pages - Frank is able to explore the different performative possibilities that sequencing affords an artist. That he works almost exclusively with small format Polaroid means that despite the narrowness of the pages the photographs can be reproduced close to 1:1 scale. These types of sequences (fig. 25) show Frank’s continual and consistent challenging of the medium in a way that is more obvious than the more traditional book works that make up the ‘visual diaries’. That these works are not yet fully appreciated is, unfortunately, symptomatic of a career spent forging a unique and intuitive path. That said Frank is not resting on his laurels, even aged ninety. In September 2014 Frank, in close collaboration with Gerhard Steidl, began the first in a series of pop-up exhibitions that sought to circumvent the expenses and difficulties of traditional retrospective exhibitions. The first exhibition, Books, Films 1947 – 2014 at the Anna Leonowens Gallery (fig. 25) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, features contact sheets and prints from The Americans as well as photographs made between 2009 and 2014 as well as a room dedicated to Frank’s film work and the books made as part of the Robert Frank Project. What makes these pop-up exhibitions feasible is that the prints are all entirely digitally printed. All of the photographs shown were acrylic inkjet prints that were printed onto rolls of newsprint, under the close supervision of Gerhard Steidl, and glued directly onto the gallery walls. Steidl described the reasoning behind such unorthodox means of exhibiting photographs in an interview with The Chronicle Herald: For years, there hasn’t been an exhibition of Robert Frank’s [work] because all his photography is in the treasures of the national gallery in Washington, or in the hands of private collectors. And the photography is quite fragile, so it is not possible to send it around the world and exhibit it…the idea was to make something totally inexpensive. It is printed on newspaper… no packaging, no transportation costs, no insurance, the exhibition is hanging on the wall, and at the end of the show it is 94 destroyed. No commercial value. This novel approach to exhibiting works proves that even this late in his career Frank’s incessant need to push the material possibilities of photography have not diminished. Frank himself described the method of exhibiting the works as ‘Cheap, quick, and dirty, that’s how I like it!’

That the prints will be destroyed at the end of the exhibition highlights Frank’s

reluctance to see his work commoditised by the art market, instead opting for an ephemeral yet easily repeatable means of displaying his work. As ever with Frank, he is not concerned with creating precious objects, once again rejecting the long held traditions of photography and how that is presented to the public, be that within the white cube gallery context or that of a book.

DL Cade. Robert Frank Will Have His Exhibition Torn to Shreds After Pop-Up Show in Halifax in Peta th Pixel, 9 September 2014. http://petapixel.com/2014/09/09/robert-frank-will-exhibition-prints-tornshreds-pop-show-halifax/ Accessed 21/2/15 95 Museum Folkwang. Robert Frank Books and Films, 1947 – 2014. http://www.museum-

folkwang.de/en/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/robert-frank.html Accessed 21/2/15

Frank is not alone in this endeavour, as there is a generation of much younger artists questioning the conventions and traditions of how photographs are shown. Wolfgang Tillmans

(b. 1968) is an obvious example of a photographic artist whose work often rejects

the formalities and limitations of traditional modes of photographic display, working with Xerox photocopies and traditional photographic prints that range from the everyday 6x4” end-prints to large format traditional c-type prints, often pinning them directly to the gallery wall. Like Frank, Tillman’s use of sequencing creates new and interesting connections between the photographs. By comparing these later works with Frank’s entire artistic career, it’s clear that the importance of poetry and performativity remain just as vital and essential as ever. Despite that fact that his reputation still seems to be rooted to The Americans, these later works serve as testament to an artist who has been perpetually carving his own path and relentlessly moving forward, regardless of whether this is recognised or not.

96 Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer whose work explores his own immediate surroundings and the limits of photography as a medium and material.

Conclusion Robert Frank has forged a career making work from the heart. That it is sometimes perhaps too close to the heart has often made it difficult and as a result overlooked. It seems clear to me that any reading of the work, particularly of the later work, as being purely personal and diaristic is to do the photographs and films a massive disservice. The subject matter of love, loss, reflection and perhaps even redemption, are universal. That is the strength of Frank’s work. In 2013 Michail Mersinis, a tutor in the Fine Art Photography department at Glasgow School of Art sent an email to Robert Frank requesting some words of advice or insight for inclusion in the second year class catalogue. Much to everyone’s surprise, a few weeks later a reply came to Mersinis’ ‘strange and presumptuous request’

for ‘a donation of words’ . Frank’s

response was very telling: Your familiarity with my work suggests that you understand that I have long run out of words. I am left with only photographs now. To satisfy the urgency of your letter and the care that your letter on behalf of your students suggests, please tell them this: Tell them to make work that is close to their heart. It seems to me that no one can 99 expect more than this. I hope this is enough. This notion of making work that is close to the heart seems to be the pervasive thread that runs throughout all of Frank’s work. That an artist, whose career has spanned over six decades, returns to the things closest to him, his wife, his family, his friends, his home and himself, suggests the resolute belief that, as Frank said, ‘…no one can expect more than this.’ Frank’s work, in all its guises and manifestations, has always had this simple belief at the crux of it. That the work is often deeply poetic and demonstrates an understanding of the performative possibilities of the material at the artist’s disposal is added proof of that belief and the strength of Frank’s artistic output. Frank’s ceaseless questioning of the world around him and tireless probing of the very material of photography form the core practice of an artist whose energy, resilience and stubborn adherence to his own artistic values have rightfully served as inspiration for 99

generations of artists. Fellow world-renowned photographer Joel Sternfeld , when asked about The Americans, described how he would, ’look at it before I went to sleep and in the

97 Email extract from correspondence between Michailand Robert Frank in 2013. See Appendix iii 98 Email extract from correspondence between Michail Mersinis and Robert Frank in 2013. See Appendix iii 99 Email extract from correspondence between Michail Mersinis and Robert Frank in 2013. See Appendix iv 99 Joel Sternfeld is an acclaimed American photographer in own right. Alongside contemporary’s such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, Sternfeld was part of a radical generation of photographers who pioneered the use of colour photography within a fine art context in the 1970s.

100

morning I would reach for it like a smoker reaches for a cigarette. I needed to see it again’

This proves without doubt that Frank’s legacy has long been well established. However I feel the subtle genius of Frank’s later work has been overlooked and underappreciated. That is to say that the poetic and performative elements that are omnipresent throughout his diverse and varied body of work to date is what sets himself apart from his contemporaries and make Robert Frank a truly unique voice within the history of photographic practice. It seems apparent to me that, much as was the case with The Americans, the significance and importance of these newer works will not receive critical understanding they deserve immediately. I believe that just as with The Americans and The Lines of My Hand, it will take the eventual recognition of a newer generation of artists and critics to truly understand and th

rightfully position these works within the history and context of 20 century photography. Already aged ninety it seems that Frank will not be here to try and again deflect that critical limelight one last time. Frank has made an entire career of pushing boundaries and redefining our understanding of the potential of images. His innate understanding of symbolism and sequencing has informed the working process of consecutive generations of artists. What can he teach us about the poetic nature of the photographs? This I feel will be the lesson that these later works will offer up to the next generation of artists and photographers so long as they are willing to spend time with the work. The oblique nature of Frank’s newest works does not immediately serve up their secrets in the same way The Americans did almost six decades ago. Instead they offer a hint or visual clue to any reader willing to mine away at the work and unravel its subtle intricateness in order to reveal, to my mind, some of the most honest and revelatory photographs ever made. That Frank can imbue these scenes of everyday with a level of 101

intrigue and poetry that, just as he’d hoped, left you wanting to read it twice

proves just how

important Frank is as an artist. Make work that is close to the heart. That is precisely what he has done.

100 Joel Sternfeld. Robert Frank in Göttingen in Robert Frank Published by Steidl. http://www.steidlville.com/pictures/pdf/Steidl_Frank_Catalogue_A4.pdf Accessed 22/2/15 101 Frank, Robert. LIFE Magazine, (26th November 1951) p.21

Bibliography Artist Books Frank, Robert. The Americans. Design by Robert Frank, Gerhard Steidl and Claas Möller. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2008) First Steidl Edition. ISBN 978-865-584-0 Frank, Robert. Black White And Things. Design by Robert Frank and Werner Zryd. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2009) First Steidl Edition. ISBN 978-3-86521-808-7 Frank, Robert. Come Again. Design by Robert Frank and Gerhard Steidl. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2006) First Edition. ISBN 3-86521-261-1 Frank, Robert. Household Inventory Record. Design by Robert Frank, A-Chan and Gerhard Steidl. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2013) First Edition. ISBN 978-3-86930-660-5 Frank, Robert. The Lines of My Hand. Edited by Robert Frank and Walter Keller. Design by Werner Zryd. (Zurich, PARKETT / DER ALLTAG Publishers Ltd 1989) First PARKETT / DER ALLTAG Edition. ISBN 3-907509-04-8 Frank, Robert. Pangnirtung. Design by Robert Frank, A-Chan and Gerhard Steidl. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2011) First Edition. ISBN 978-3-86930 Frank, Robert. Paris. Sequence by Robert Frank and Ute Eskildsen. Design by Gerhard Steidl and Sarah Winter. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2008) First Edition. ISBN 978-3-86521524-6 Frank, Robert. Park/Sleep. Design by Robert Frank, A-Chan and Gerhard Steidl. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2013) First Edition. ISBN 978-3-86930-585-1 Frank, Robert. Partida. Design by Robert Frank, A-Chan and Gerhard Steidl. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2014) First Edition. ISBN – 978-3-86930-795-4 Frank, Robert. Peru. Design by Robert Frank and Gerhard Steidl. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2008) First Edition. ISBN 978-3-8521-692-2 Frank, Robert. Portfolio 40 Photos 1941/1946. Design by Robert Frank and Gerhard Steidl. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2009) First Edition. ISBN 978-86521-813-1 Frank, Robert. Seven Stories. Edited by Robert Frank and A-Chan. Design by Robert Frank, A-Chan and Gerhard Steidl. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2009) First Steidl Edition. ISBN 9783-86531-789-9 Frank, Robert. Tal Uf Tal Ab. Design by Robert Frank, A-Chan and Gerhard Steidl. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2010) First Edition. ISBN 978-3-86930-102-0 Frank, Robert. Thank You. Design by Hanz Werner Holwarth, Berlin. Edited with Ed Grazda. (Zurich-Berlin-New York, Scalo 1996) First Scalo Edition. ISBN 3-931141-27-6 Frank, Robert. You Would. Design by Robert Frank, A-Chan and Gerhard Steidl. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2012) First Edition. ISBN 978-3-86930-418-2

Artist Films Frank, Robert. Conversations in Vermont (1969). [DVD] Part of twelve-piece TV-serial for KQED-TV in San Fransisco. (Dilexi Foundation) Borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 16mm B&W, 27mins. . http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15

Frank, Robert. C’est Vrai! (One Hour) (1990). [DVD] Borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Video Colour, 60mins. http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15 Frank, Robert. Home Improvements (1985). [DVD] Borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Video Colour, 29mins. http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15 Frank, Robert. Life Dances On… (1980). [DVD] Borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 16mm Colour and B&W, 30mins. http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15 Frank, Robert. Me and My Brother (1965-68). [VHS] Borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 35mm Colour and B&W, 91mins. http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15 Frank, Robert. Moving Pictures (1994). [DVD] Borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Video Colour and B&W, Silent 16mins 30sec. http://www.mfah.org/films/robertfrank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15 Frank, Robert. Paper Route (2002). [DVD] Made by order of the Expo Project (Vega Film). Borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Video Colour, 23mins. http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15 Frank, Robert. The Present (1996). Borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Video/35mm Colour, 27mins. http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15 Frank, Robert. Pull My Daisy (1959). [DVD] Borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. (G-String Productions and Walter Gutman) 16mm B&W, 28mins. http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15 Frank, Robert. This Song for Jack (1983). [DVD] Shot at the conference “On the Road: The Jack Kerouac Conference” (23/7 – 1/8/1982) Borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 16mm B&W, 26mins. http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15 Frank, Robert. True Story (2004-08). [DVD] Borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Video Colour and B&W, 26mins. http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15

Exhibition Catalogues/Monographs Flamingo (The 1996 Hasselblad Award). Edited by Lars Hall and Gunilla Knape. (Zurich – Berlin – New York, The Hasselbad Center and Scalo 1997) First Edition. ISBN 3-9311419551 Frank Films: The Film and Video Works of Robert Frank. Edited by Brigitta Burger Utzer and Stefan Grisseman. Published on the occasion of Diagonale Special ‘Robert Frank – Retrospective of the Films and Videos’ as part of Graz European Cultural Capital 2003 in augartenkino kiz, Graz 11th – 21st Septermber 2003. (Zurich-Berlin-New York, Scalo 2003) First Scalo Edition. ISBN 3-908247-75-6 HOLD STILL_keep going. Edited by Ute Eskildsen. Design by i.de-Sabine an Huef. (ZurichBerlin-New York, Museum Folkwang, Essen, and Scalo 2001) First Scalo Edition. ISBN 3908247-40-3 Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans. Sarah Greenough. Edited by Michelle Piranio with Tam Curry Bryfogle. Published on the occasion of ‘Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The

Americans” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington January 18 – April 26 2009. (Göttingen, Germany, National Gallery of Art Washington in association with Steidl 2009) First Edition. ISBN 978-3-86521-748-6 Moving Out. Sarah Greenough and Philip Bookman with contributions by Martin Gasser, W.S. Di Piero, John Hahnardt. Edited by Frances Smyth and Mary Yakush. Catalog of travelling nd exhibition opening at National Gallery of Art, Washington 2 October 1994. (Zurich-BerlinNew York, National Gallery of Art, Washington and Scalo 1994) First Scalo Edition. ISBN 1881616-26-6 New York to Nova Scotia. Edited by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Philip Brookman. First Published in 1986 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and New York Graphic Society Books. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2005) First Steidl Edition. ISBN 3-86521-013-9 Storylines. Designed by Robert Frank, Gerhard Steidl and Claas Möller. First Published on the occasion of ‘Robert Frank: Storylines’ at Tate Modern, London 28th October 2004 – 23rd January 2005. (Göttingen, Germany, Steidl 2004) First Steidl Edition. ISBN 1-85437-560-1

Books Badger, Gerry. The Genius of Photography: How Photography Has Changed Our Lives. Edited by Mary Davies. (London, Quadrille Publishing Limited 2008) Third Edition. ISBN 978184400-363-1 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Originally published in French as La Chambre Claire by Editions du Seuil 1980. Translated by Richard Howard. (London, Vintage 2000) First Published by Vintage in 1993. Day, Jonathan. Robert Frank: The Americans The Art Of Documentary Photography. Edited by Sue Jarvis. (Bristol, Intellect 2011) First Edition. ISBN 978-84150-315-8 Gefter, Philip. Photography After Frank. Edited by Susan Ciccotti. (New York, Aperture Foundation 2009) First Edition. ISBN 978-1-9711-095-2 Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. Edited by Lawerence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. th Peters. First Published 1956 (San Francisco, City Lights Bookstore 2006) 50 Anniversary Edition. ISBN 978-0-87286-017-9 Goldin, Nan. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. (New York, Aperture Foundation 1986) First published 1986. ISBN 9780893812362 Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. First Published by Viking Press Ltd in 1957 (London, Penguin Books Limited 2000) Penguins Classics Edition. ISBN 978-0141182674 Nichols, Bill. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. Edited by Bill Nicholls. (Los Angeles, California, University of California Press Berkeley 2001) ISBN 978-0-520-22732-3 Phillips, Lisa. Beat Culture and the New America 1950 – 1965. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 9/11/1995 – 4/2/1996. (Los Angeles, California, Whitney Museum/Flammarion 1995) ISBN 087427-098-7

Documentaries Adolph, Jörg and Wetzel, Gereon. How to Make a Book with Steidl. [DVD] Documentary following Gerhard Steidl, the world renown publisher who specialises in publishing bespoke artist books. (if…Productions with ZDF/3sat supported by FFF Bayern 2010) Colour 88mins.

Brookman, Amy and Brookman, Philip. A Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank. [VHS] A documentary by Philip and Amy Brookman for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in association with KUHT-Public Television, Houston 1986. (Produced by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Paul Yeager) Colour and b&w 28 mins. http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 9/1/15 Fox, Gerald. Coming Home, Leaving Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank. [Video] YouTube upload of documentary made for a special episode of ‘The South Bank Show’ January 2005, uploaded to YouTube November 2012. (The South Bank Show, ITV, 2005) Colour and B&W, 48mins 47 secs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt97Jomj5nw Accessed 1/3/14. Kirby, Tim. The Genius of Photography. [DVD] A six episode BBC documentary television series documenting the history of photography from its inception to the present day. (BBC Films and Wall to Wall Television Limited 2009) Colour, 352 mins Approx.

Video Interviews Cooper, Thomas Joshua. Exposición: True de Thomas Joshua Cooper. [Video]. Interview with Thomas Joshua Cooper, discussing his exhibition at CDAN, Huesca Spain. Uploaded to Youtube by Canal de CDANARTEYNATURALEZA. Colour, 4mins 10secs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifzatCLgTZs Accessed 2/2/15 Cooper, Thomas Joshua. The World’s End: The Atlantic Basin Project. [Video]. Artist talk given as th

part of the Glasgow School of Art Friday Event lecture series on 24 of October 2008. Uploaded to Vimeo by The Glasgow School of Art . Colour, 1hr 27mins 33secs. http://vimeo.com/63318647. Accessed 9/2/15

Meyerowitz, Joel. The Day I Met Robert Frank. [Video]. Interview with Joel Meyerowitz discussing his first meeting with Robert Frank and how that led him to becoming a photographer himself, uploaded to YouTube by Phaidon Press. Colour, 7mins 27secs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvRyXju8Fmo Accessed 10/10/14

Articles and Interviews Badger, Gerry. The Indecisive Moment: Frank, Klein and ‘Stream of Consciousness’ Photography (2004). An essay by writer and curator Gerry Badger that address the iconoclastic nature of both Robert Frank’s book ‘The Americans’ and William Klein’s book ‘New York’ uploaded to American Suburb X, an online photography archive and resource. URL: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/06/theory-indecisive-moment-frank-klein.html. Accessed: 23/10/14 Barnard, Elissa. Exhibit of Celebrated Photographer Pops Up in Halifax. Article detailing Robert Frank’s exhibition Books, Films, 1947 – 2014 at the Anna Leonowens Gallery at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia in The Chronicle Herald, th published September 4 2014. URL: http://thechronicleherald.ca/artslife/1234142-exhibit-ofcelebrated-photographer-robert-frank-pops-up-in-halifax Accessed 21/2/15 Boxer, Sarah. CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK; An Untameable Outsider Who Speaks in Riddles. An article marking Robert Frank being award the Edward McDowell Medal for outstanding th contribution to photography first published in the New York Times 26 August 2002. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/26/arts/critic-s-notebook-an-untamable-outsider-whospeaks-in-riddles.html Accessed 10/10/14 Cade, DL. Robert Frank Will Have His Exhibition Torn to Shreds After Pop-Up Show in th Halifax in Peta Pixel, 9 September 2014. An article reviewing Robert Frank’s exhibition Books, Films, 1947 – 2014 at the Anna Leonowens Gallery at the Nova Scotia College of Art

and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia in Peta Pixel, an online blog dedicated to photography. URL: http://petapixel.com/2014/09/09/robert-frank-will-exhibition-prints-torn-shreds-pop-showhalifax/ Accessed 21/2/15 College, Wellesley. Interview: Robert Frank – “Interview at Wellesley College” (1977). An interview with Robert Frank from one of ten symposiums at Wellesley College called “Photography within the Humanities” in 1977 uploaded to American Suburb X, an online photography archive and resource. URL: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2013/02/interview-robert-frank-interview-at-wessellycollege-1977.html Accessed 10/10/14 Cook, Jon. Robert Frank: “Dissecting the American Image” (1986). Essay detailing Robert Frank’s progression from ‘The Americans’ to ‘The Lines of My Hand’ first published in Exposure Magazine, Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 1986 uploaded to American Suburb X, an online photography archive and resource. URL: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/01/theory-robert-frank-dissecting-american.html Accessed 10/10/14 Cooper, Thomas Joshua. Thomas Joshua Cooper’s Best Shot. Interviewed by Leo th Benedictus for The Guardian newspaper, 28 August 2008. URL: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/aug/28/photography.art1 Accessed 12/10/14 Cotkin, George. The Photographer in the Beat-Hipster Idiom: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’. PDF upload of an essay discussing the importance and legacy of Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’. URL: http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=hist_fac Accessed 10/10/14 Di Piero, W.S. THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 4-27-03: ARCHIVE; Ahead of His Moment. An article about work from Robert Frank’s exhibition ‘London/Wales’ at Corcoran Gallery, th Washington first published in the New York Times on 27 April 2003. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-4-27-03-archive-aheadof-his-moment.html Accessed 10/10/14 Enright, Robert. ‘Possibly, Everything: An Interview with Robert Frank’ (BorderCrossings, Issue 125, Winnipeg, March 2013) Copy of an article first published in issue 125 of Canadian cultural quarterly magazine BorderCrossings URL: http://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/possibly-everything-an-interview-with-robert-frank Accessed: 4/3/14 Fallis, Greg. Robert Frank (II). Article about the life and career of Robert Frank in Ututa Photography, an online collective of photographers and writers. URL: http://www.utata.org/sundaysalon/robert-frank-ii/ Accessed 10/10/14 Folkwang, Museum. Robert Frank Books, Films, 1947 – 2014. A press release for Robert Frank’s 2015 exhibition Books, Films, 1947 – 2014 at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, th Germany between April 17 and August 2015. URL: http://www.museumfolkwang.de/en/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/robert-frank.html Accessed 21/2/15 Frank, Robert. A Statement (1958). Copy of a statement first published in U.S. Camera Annual, 1958 p.115 hosted on the online photography archive American Suburb X. URL: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/07/robert-frank-a-statement-1958.html Accessed: 12/10/14 th

Frank, Robert. LIFE Magazine (26 November 1951) p.21 Frank, Robert, Haworth-Booth, Mark, Jobey, Liz, Mark, Mary Ellen, Reed, Lou and Ruscha, Ed. Six Reflections on the Photography of Robert Frank. Copy of an article first published in Tate Etc. Issue 2: Autumn 2004. URL: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/sixreflections-on-photography-robert-frank. Accessed 10/10/14

Gallery, Danziger. The Heart and The Eye Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank in the World. Press release for joint exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank at th nd Danziger Gallery, New York between 24 January and 22 March 2014. URL: http://www.danzigergallery.com/exhibition/the-heart-and-the-eye. Accessed: 18/11/14 Gefter, Philip. The Bohemian Beat Poetics of Robert Frank. (Foam, Issue 25/Traces p.197 – 110, 2010) Selected portfolio and article published in Dutch photographic quarterly Foam, first published Winter 2010. URL: http://www.foam.org/foam-magazine/issues/issue-25-traces and http://issuu.com/foam-magazine/docs/25_traces/138?e=0 Accessed 10/10/14 Gefter, Philip. Snapshots from the American Road. An interview with Robert Frank to promote the exhibition ‘Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans’ at the National Gallery of Art, th Washington first published in the New York Times on 12 December 2008. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/arts/design/14geft.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Accessed 10/10/14 Glicksman, Marlaine. Highway ‘61 Revisited. Copy of a interview first published in Film Comment, 1987 uploaded and hosted on the online photography archive American Suburb X. URL: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/02/interview-robert-frank-highway-61-revisited1987.html Accessed: 19/1/15 Goldberg, Vicki. Before ‘The Americans’, Robert Frank’s Europeans. Review of the exhibition ‘Robert Frank: London/Wales’ at the Corcoran Galleryof Art, Washington first published in the New York Times on 8th June 2003. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/arts/artarchitecture-before-the-americans-robert-frank-s-europeans.html Accessed 10/10/14 Goldin, Nan. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Press release for the 2012 Aperture republishing of Nan Goldin’s seminal 1986 work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. URL: http://aperture.org/shop/books/nan-goldin-the-ballad-of-sexual-dependency-book Accessed 20/2/15 Houston, Museum of Fine Arts. Film and Video by Robert Frank. Digitised version of inventory leaflet of Frank’s films and videos held in the museums collection and available for rental. URL: http://cinefiles.bampfa.berkeley.edu//cinefiles/DocDetail?docId=21619 Accessed 10/10/14 Houston, Museum of Fine Arts. Robert Frank Collection. Overview of the circulating collection of Robert Frank’s films and videos held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. URL: http://www.mfah.org/films/robert-frank-collection/ Accessed 10/10/14 Hsu, Leo. Paris Peru. A review by writer and photographer Leo Hsu of two of Robert Frank’s earliest bodies of work which has subsequently been published by Steidl as part of ‘The Robert Frank Collection’ and uploaded to FOTO8, an online blog for writing on photojournalism dated 14/11/08. URL: http://www.foto8.com/live/paris-peru/. Accessed: 23/10/14 Johnson, William S. Robert Frank Self Portrait (‘The Polaroid Project’ I). Blogpost written about Robert Frank’s involvement with the Polaroid Project at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1985. URL: http://vintagephotosjohnson.com/2012/10/28/robert-frank-self-portrait/ Accessed 10/10/14 Kimmelman, Micheal. PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Uncompromising Artist Covers Rough Ground. Review of Robert Frank’s major career retrospective ‘Moving Out’ at the National th Gallery of Art, Washington in 1995 first published in the New York Times 17 November 1995. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/17/movies/photography-reviewuncompromising-artist-covers-rough-ground.html Accessed 10/10/14

Kouvaros, George. He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother. Essay published in online in the journal Screening the Past, Issue 29. Screening the Past is a peer-reviewed journal of screen history, theory and criticism online publication supported by La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. URL: http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/29/robert-frank-me-and-mybrother.html and http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/current/current.html Accessed: 19/1/15 Kouvaros, George. ‘Time and How to Note it Down’: The Lessons of Pull My Daisy in Screen, Spring 2012. An essay published in Oxford journal Screen that looks critically at the relationship between Jack Kerouac’s narration and Robert Frank’s cinematography to create the essence of spontaneity and experience of time on film. URL: http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/content/53/1/1.abstract Accessed: 16/1/15 Landstöm, Fanny. ‘Review: Robert Frank – “Park/Sleep” (2013)’. A review of Park/Sleep commissioned by American Suburb X, an online photography archive and resource. URL: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2013/07/review-robert-frank-parksleep-2013.html Accessed: 2/3/14 LeDuff, Charlie. Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey. Extensive article and interview with Robert Frank documenting his recent trip to China and reflections upon his life and career with Pulitzer prize winning wiriter Charlie LeDuff first published in Vanity Fair in April 2008. URL: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/04/frank200804 Accessed 10/10/14 Loke, Margarett. PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; A Master Who Can Perceive Unorthodoxy in the Ordinary. This article was written to highlight some of the lesser known works on show at the ‘Robert Frank: Photographs and Books, 1950s to 1990s’ at the Scalo Gallery, SoHo New th York and was first published in the New York Times on October 20 2000. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/20/arts/photography-review-a-master-who-can-perceiveunorthodoxy-in-the-ordinary.html Accessed 10/10/14 Maas, Willard. Poetry and Film: The Symposium in Film Culture, No. 29, 1963, pp.55-63. Transcript of a two part symposium organised by Cinema 16. URL: http://www.virtualcircuit.org/word/pages/Poetry/Symposium_Poetry.html Accessed: 20/1/15 Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. PDF upload of the second edition American film critic Bill Nichol’s seminal book on documentary film criticism. URL: http://www.quintadimensao.net/loop/data/air/UE/Bill%20Nichols%20%20%20Introduction%20to%20documentary.pdf Accessed 16/2/15 Norman, Howard. Robert Frank in Conversation with Howard Norman: Beirut. PDF upload of a transcribed conversation between Robert Frank and Howard Norman at New York Public th Library on 30 September 2006 about Franks photographs from Beirut, made in the early and his career in general. URL: http://cdnprod.www.aws.nypl.org/sites/default/files/events/frank93006.pdf Accessed 10/10/14 Packham, Monte and Sternfeld, Joel. Robert Frank published by Steidl. (Steidl, Göttingen, Germany 2009) PDF Copy of leaflet that comes with many of Robert Frank’s books published by Steidl, containing two essays and a comprehensive overview of the Robert Frank Project. URL: http://www.steidlville.com/pictures/pdf/Steidl_Frank_Catalogue_A4.pdf Accessed 10/10/14 Packham, Monte. Robert Frank. Essay and interview between Robert Frank, June Leaf, Gerhard Steidl, François Marie-Bainer as observed by Monte Packham published in HUH, an th online arts and culture magazine based in London on 10 March 2009. URL: http://www.huhmagazine.co.uk/733/robert-frank Accessed 10/10/14 Reznik, Eugene. Following Pop-up Show, Robert Frank Will Have Exhibition Prints Destroyed th in American Photo, September 8 2014. Review of Robert Frank’s exhibition Books, Films, 1947 – 2014 at the Anna Leonowens Gallery at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,

Halifax, Nova Scotia in American Photo, an American photography magazine and online journal. URL: http://www.americanphotomag.com/article/2014/09/following-pop-show-robertfrank-will-have-exhibition-prints-destroyed Accessed 21/2/15 Reznik, Eugene. Interview: Duane Michals on 50 Years of Sequences and Staging Photos in th American Photo, November 12 2014. Interview with photographer Duane Michals on the occasion of his major career retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. http://www.americanphotomag.com/photo-gallery/2014/11/interview-duane-michalsstoryteller-retrospective-carnegie-museum Accessed 20/2/15 Robinson, John. While the Camera Was Rolling. Article about Robert Frank’s infamous film th about the Rolling Stones ‘Cocksucker Blues’ first published in the Guardian newspaper 9 October 2004. URL: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/oct/09/popandrock Accessed 10/10/14 Rong, Jiang. Interview: Robert Frank - “If Artist’s Don’t Take Risks, Then It’s Not Worth It.” (2007). Exclusive interview between Chinese writer Jiang Rong and Robert Frank at his New York studio in 2007 hosted American Suburb X. URL: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/12/interview-robert-frank-if-an-artist-doesnt-take-risksthen-its-not-worth-it-2007.html Accessed: 5/3/14 Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Metaphysical [on Robert Frank’s C’EST VRAI!/ONE HOUR]. Article about Robert Frank’s one hour long, single take 1990 film ‘C’est Vrai!’ also know as ‘One Hour’ American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, revised and updated from the article that appears in the hardcover version of ‘Frank Films: The Film and Video Works’ published by Scalo Zurich-Berlin-New York in 2003. URL: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2003/09/metaphysical-cest-vraione-hour/Accessed 10/10/10 Row, D.K. Robert Frank and Photography: Art in the Age of Image Overload. An article considering Robert Frank’s Polaroid work at the Blue Sky Gallery, Oregon in 2012 and the implications of digital technology effect on photography today, first published in the Oregonian st newspaper 21 January 2012. URL: http://www.oregonlive.com/art/index.ssf/2012/01/robert_frank_and_photography_a.html Accessed 10/10/14 Searle, Adrian. In Search of Lost Time. Review of Robert Frank’s career retrospective th ‘Storylines’ at Tate Modern first published in the Guardian newspaper 26 October 2004. URL: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/oct/26/photography Accessed 10/10/14 Slenske, Micheal. A Film Inside a Film. An article about Robert Frank’s 1968 film ‘Me and My Brother’ first published in Art in America magazine in October 2009. URL: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/robert-frank-me-and-my-brother-/ Accessed 10/10/14 Wallis, Brian. Interview with Robert Frank: American Visions – Photographer and Filmmaker. An interview with Robert Frank that was first published in Art in America magazine in March 1996 and has been uploaded to American Suburb X, an online photography archive and resource. URL: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/02/theory-interview-with-robertfrank.html Accessed 10/10/14 Woodward, Richard B. Where Have You Gone, Robert Frank? First published in the New th York Times on September 4 1994, Richard B. Woodward interviews Robert Frank to promote his major retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, Washington ‘Moving Out’. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/04/magazine/where-have-you-gone-robertfrank.html?src=pm&pagewanted=1 Accessed: 10/10/14

Appendix i.

‘It’s weird but it’s a really important thing about Badger, who is a remarkable writer, I mean he is a truly great writer, but the problem with this ‘decisive’ thing is that, I think, it’s more a literary thing to use as a counter to something. And let’s remember there are two things here, the thing about Delpire was he was a total bastard by the way, very controlling, tough guy, but he let’s this kid of what? Twenty-something years old come in and make the sequence? He didn’t even let Cartier-Bresson make the sequence for The Decisive Moment! Delpire does something unheard of and gives up control. He lets this kid come in and lets this complete structure come together! And that remark by Badger I think is really important but the thing is it’s remarkably precise! And that’s where I’m heading, rather than decisive; and I can speak critically here, I think it’s an improvised moment. If I’m full of shit you need to say so but what I will say is that we share a common interest in the work. Badger gets it, you know. I mean Badger loves opera. I’ve known him since the 1970s and I think he’s the most important European writer on photography alive but that phrase indecisive doesn’t make sense when talking about Frank! It suggests inaccuracy and those fuckers aren’t inaccurate! They may be intuitive but it’s an improvisation through practice. It’s like the great jazz people he was surrounded by, Allen Ginsberg - I mean fuck! It sounds obvious to say but to be improvisational means you must first start by learning the rules! And that’s where Badger gets it - the small camera usage, the snap shot! It’s about how to use the camera, to have that skill. You had one of the first Leica’s out and the thing with those little cameras was that you could hold it like that in one hand. You could, cock it and fire the shutter with one hand! Frank left Switzerland and went on a journey and met three people. Cartier-Bresson in Paris, Bill Brandt in London and Walker Evans in America. Those three teach him something about the camera and about picture making that has more to do with music and poetry than the stuff he learned back in Zurich. Some kinds of technical training is hard to lose.’

ii.

‘There is something to be said about his relationship with his kids and his lifestyle. It’s like we saw in that film (Conversations in Vermont), you know? I’m a parent too and I could see right from the very start of that movie the strain already there between him and Pablo and with Andrea! I mean, Andrea, my god! She just runs over to him in that goddamned car and you can see! You can just see that she wants to give her dad a hug through that car window but he’s not interested – there’s a distance there. I sat there watching with my daughter and I grabbed her hand, it was heart breaking! And I think by the time The Lines of My Hand comes around he’s starting to realise that. By that point, Andrea has died and Pablo’s mental health is so shot to shit that he doesn’t know what to do. Maybe your right, maybe the words on the photographs are his way of saying what he couldn’t in real life. Remember John, Frank is a Jew who grew up in Switzerland during the war, the Nazi’s were on the fucking doorstep! That hard, Swiss German character is hard to shake. He can’t show any weakness.’

iii.

To: From: Subject:

Robert Frank Michail Mersinis 4 Words Dear Mr. Frank My name is Michail Mersinis, I come from Greece and I am currently working as an artist and teaching in the Fine Art Photography department of the Glasgow School of Art. I am writing to both express my deep admiration for your work and to ask on behalf of my students her at the Glasgow School of Art to consider perhaps donating a couple of words for a group catalogue that the students

will prepare and present by the end of the Second Term, Tuesday th 12 of March 2013. I realise Mr Frank that the donation of words must seem both a strange and presumptuous request so please allow me to explain a request that is unsolicited and unexpected. In the Second Year of their undergraduate studies, the students in the Fine Art photography Department negotiate the creative space of the book, making both each an individual artist’s book and also collaborate to make a Yeargroup Catalogue at the end of the second term. During the course of all three terms there is a series of lectures that presents and discusees the work of individual artists, and your work Mr. Frank was the one that had both the biggest interest and deepest impact to the students of my yeargroup. In particular 4 words seem to have become so important to them as to prompt them to ask me in return to contact you. In your book ‘The Lines of My Hand’ there are four words that have become crucial to the way that they view both their developing practices and photography. HOLD STILL KEEP GOING are the 4 words that have become important for them and they have identified with. These four words that come from looking at your work developed to a call that touched my students and myself deeply Sir. It seems especially today – perhaps more so than ever these four words become more and more important to a generation of young makers that think about senior and important makers such as yourself and take inspiration and purpose. I am writing to you with a small, but very sincere request Mr Frank. Would you please consider donating just a couple of words to 28 students of the Fine Art Photography Department of the Glasgow School of Art for a group catalogue? ‘Hold Still Keep Going’ detonated our imagination and delight – and our interest in your work and photography Mr. Frank and on behalf of my students I would like to extend my gratitude for this. Thank you very much for taking the time to read this letter Mr. Frank. I do sincerely hope that you are neither offended nor harassed by such a request. Should your time or interest not allow to grant my students’ off hand request, please know that we understand and respect this. If however you do feel that you would like to provide a couple of words, please know that this would mean a lot for us. Once again, please accept my highest regard and respect for your work and I wish you all the best. Sincerely yours, Michail Mersinis

iv.

To: From: Subject:

Michail Mersinis Robert Frank 4 Words Dear Michail, Your kind letter made me smile. I have to confess your letter came as a surprise, as donating words is an unexpected request. Your familiarity with my work suggests that you understand I have long run of words. I am left with only photographs now. To satisfy the urgency and care that your letter on behalf of your students suggests, please tell them this: Tell them to make works that is close to their heart. It seems to me that no one can expect more than this. I hope this is enough. Regards Robert