Sigal, Simon and Frank Analysis

Nathan Hetzler ART 333 Caldwell 1/23/2013 Frank, Simon and Sigal Analysis The photo book is an often overlooked artistic medium unto itself, but three particular books by photographers Taryn Simon, Ivan Sigal and Robert Frank demonstrate three different approaches to the art form. The Americans by Robert Frank is considered a classic photo book example and was extraordinarily influential on photo books that followed. The photographs within document Frank’s, and his family’s, travels across the United States by car in the late 1950s. The book was published a few short years later and continues to be immensely influential over fifty years later. To exemplify the impact of The Americans, Ivan Sigal’s book, White Road, released just last year, looks and feels very similar to Frank’s book, with some interesting changes. Sigal traveled around in Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the late 1990s and early 2000s trying to document the lives of rural villagers following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Sigal’s collection of photographs can be seen in book form but also as a show in Washington D.C. at the Corcoran Gallery. Across the hall at the Corcoran is another show based on a book.

Taryn Simon’s book, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters was, like Sigal’s, first and foremost a large book of photographs that later became a gallery show. Simon’s book is a study of genealogies and families who are related in some major way to world events. Her book also documents personal belongings of that family and describes how the family and objects relate to one another. This paper will be straightforward in structure, describing first the similarities and differences between each project that the photographers embarked on, then describing the photographs themselves, then the page layout of the books, then the book structure and finally reevaluating the book projects as wholes in themselves.

In 1955 and 1956, Robert Frank set out to document life in the United States. His images cover a series of themes ranging from generational differences, life and death, cultural icons, family, memory, race, and community. Even though the topics varied quite a bit, Frank’s focus never strayed from the American way of life and the many facets of it. Ivan Sigal started a very similar project in the late 1990s in Eurasia. He too was very much concerned with a specific region and the virtually limitless cultural and political topics associated with that place. In fact, many of the topics that Frank was interested in were also of concern to Sigal. Differences in generations can be seen in White Road while the struggle between life and death is given a strikingly human face when Sigal shows us the isolating lives of tuberculosis patients. And just as Frank shows us the iconic images of the cowboy, the movie star, the wealthy and the poor that have become conventional in American culture (though no less interesting through Frank’s camera), Sigal’s book similarly brings back old Soviet imagery in the form of Lenin’s shadow and a chained bear performing at a circus. If we think of how these two photographers conceptualized their projects, the similarities are clear. Neither was particularly focused on one or two main themes. Their books are significant for their large thematic scopes and the way in which they touch on many important themes. They did, however, focus their projects in a regional scope. They were dedicated to observing a time and place and the people who inhabit it.

Taryn Simon on the other hand did just the opposite. She focused her project to a few major themes about family and memory but extrapolated those themes to a global scope. The cases she studies are racially and ethnically diverse and represent all parts of the globe. The Americans, White Road, and Living Man all represent ambitious projects undertaken by master photographers, but what makes them so successful is the way they balance focus and scope.

Americans and White Road represent a regional focus with multiple thematic scopes while

Living Man represents a specific thematic scope with a global perspective. That’s not to say that Living Man is more focused than the other two, each photographer is very intentional with the work they end up publishing, it just means that the way the photographers think about that focus is slightly different. What is important here is that the projects are grounded in some focus whether it is regional and cultural or about one specific theme.

As far as the images are concerned, again, Sigal and Frank are the most alike, but they aren’t without some very important and striking differences. In The Americans, Robert Frank what was most accessible and convenient for him to use. His images are black and white film images with a lot of contrast and a lot of grain. Not dissimilarly, Sigal used black and white film for his project in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. His images, like Frank’s exhibit a large range between black and white and a lot of grain in some images. What is different about the photographs of both men is Sigal’s experimentation with panoramic cameras. Frank’s photographs and his book at large, is extremely stylistically consistent. In contrast with Frank’s strict adherence to consistent sizing, Sigal includes a handful of images created with two different types of panoramic camera. These photographs are each longer than they are tall and break up the monotony of consistent image size. One of these types of cameras produces a horizon distorting effect that curves some of the lines in the image but gives a clear view of a large section of the scene that would otherwise be outside Sigal’s frame. The other camera, as Sigal explained to me, does not produce such a line distortion, though it does still offer a greater range of view than a normal camera. If Frank did not use the exact same camera for all of his images, he did obviously take great care to make the output look uniform. Sigal, on the other hand sought out cameras that would make some images standout for their unique perspective on a scene. Another similarity between the images of Sigal and those of Frank are the places in

which the subject is shot. Sigal and Frank were very careful to exhibit a low profile while shooting and capture their subjects in their natural environments. The photographs are carefully made to look as if there were no photographer or that the subject is acting naturally.

Taryn Simon did not use a black and white film camera for her book. Her photographs are color and digital. Her photographs are also all uniform portraits in the sense that every model is sat in front of the same tan backdrop and photographed using the exact same lighting. Each person is also photographed individually. More unusual however, some of her “photographs” aren’t even images at all. Simon wanted to represent the entire genealogy in her chapters, but some family members were unwilling to have their pictures taken, unable to, or in some cases, dead. For these family members, tan blank frames mark their “portraits”. These however are just the images that Simon took herself. Some of the images included in the collection are found objects or documents scanned and added to the collection to say something more about the family. For example, in Chapter XI, Simon tells the story of Hans Frank, Adolf Hitler’s personal legal advisor and important Nazi figure. In this chapter, Simon photographs remaining family members, though some did not wish to participate and are either represented by clothing or the same tan background. At the end of the chapter, Simon includes important Nazi documents, Hans Frank’s personal diary entries relating to his relationship with Hitler and photographs of the family’s home. Simon’s images clearly represent a different function within her project than the photographs of Sigal and Frank, for whom documenting people or objects meant documenting them in their natural environments. Again, neither function of the photograph is “right” or “wrong” but different, and speak to differences at the book level.

In terms of how the images are laid out on the page, The Americans is the most uniform.

There is always exactly one image per spread that takes up almost the entire right hand side of

the book. The left side is blank except for a small caption saying where the picture was taken.

This is the only text in the entire book, except for a short introduction written by Jack Kerouac.

The page layout is perhaps the biggest difference between The Americans and White Road. Sigal experimented with different sizes of images in his book, but he also experimented with different layouts. Many of his spreads have two images, though not all. Some of them do have a single image on the right hand side, though others have the right hand side blank with an image on the left. Sigal explained that this was done very intentionally as a way to tightly control the rhythm and pacing of the book overall. For the most part, this leads to a more quickly paced book than The Americans where every spread has two images, but every now and then, there are blank pauses that slow down this pace. Sigal’s book also doesn’t include any text at all, though there is another book that accompanies it and provides a great deal of insight into Sigal’s process.

Simon also includes a great deal of text in her book. Her chapters begin with a short description of the family we are just about to see. On the next page, the genealogy is presented with several portraits on one page. After turning the page, we are shown larger portraits of the individual family members. Four portraits per spread gives some sense of a moderate pace. After each family member is again shown, the family objects are shown though with little clearly defined pattern. A brief description is also included on each facing page.

From the initial conception of each project, to the photographic stage to the page layout stage to the structure of the book, The Americans, White Road, and A Living Man Declared Dead represent a variety of fully composed photo books that show how a book really is much more than the sum of its photographic image parts. There is far more involved to the finished project than the mere collection of images can really concisely express.