Robert Frank – Photography on the road in America by Taneli Eskola
This article was published in Helsingin Sanomat -newspaper in 1982, at the same time at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte in Helsinki, there was exhibition of Robert Frank
Translation: Petronella Grönroos
This article is in Finnsh here.
Robert Frank became a classic name in photography, when he photographed America as a European in the 1950s. Now pictures by Frank, from both the famous book “The Americans” and from earlier years in Europe, can be seen as original prints in Helsinki. Photographer Taneli Eskola writes about Frank:
In 1947, the same year America began public television broadcasting, the steamboat James B. Moore landed in New York aboard with Robert Frank, a photographer-to-be soon to forget all about his Swiss nationality.
One of the first images on the new continent of promises: on the street amongst the motley crowd, a policeman with a mystic top hat. Horizon lies low. In between the skyscrapers reaching to the heights there swims along a huge balloon. Hanging from it, a rubber athlete, a bodybuilder about to burst at its seams. A floating memory of the plagues of the war – a commercial substitute of the paratrooper lying lifeless on the electric wire as depicted by Robert Capa.
The image with the balloon can be seen as a type of a code image for americanism of its time. Behind the seemingly peaceful parade, there still lies the US’ cold war agenda, the inflamed atmosphere of empty national self-esteem and cultural rectification. The war had been won, but it’s bitter legacy was only just beginning to sink in: the nuclear threat, the frustration of a lost generation swarming in restless exile.
McCarthyism running amok – among others Paul Strand and Charles Chaplin had left the country for good – the street became a metaphorical, modern, stage for different forms of art.
Chaplin had left in 1952, and his first film in Europe was “A King in New York”, a testament to americanism. In the film a de-throned European king arrives in New York, infatuated with it. On its streets he meets the reality, like a punch in the face.
The radioactive 50s.
At the beginning of the fifties, Frank photographed in Peru, Spain, England and France.
A picture from London: Industrial estate at the outskirts of the city. A strange event brakes the silence of a deserted courtyard: a dog in the air. Is it jumping or falling? Levitating perhaps? Something significant must have happened outside the frame.
Frank has said that two photographers have influenced him: Walker Evans and Bill Brandt. The bowler hatted walkers in London and the miners in Wales photographed by Frank have indeed a dark english quality, they have a similar blunt plasticity as Brandt’s classic images of the same subject matter.
When photographing Paris, Frank didn’t have a connection to the mainstream of French photography: no Parisian romanticism, no decisive moment of Cartier-Bresson.
Everything can be photographed
If not before, by the time of his images of Europe Frank became acknowledged by the expert circles of photography with his original point of view, and the often subjectively realistic poetry of his images. The “destiny transformed into consciousness”, as formulated by Andre Malraux, could in Frank’s case mean a similar unwavering spirit as seen with the neorealistic film makers, when faced with the subject, when faced with life.
American photography in the fifties produced sentimental images of people and mainstream journalism treading water with its massive engine.
The “Family of Man” exhibiton was a long expected alternative; It gave an audience of millions photographs from all around the world as if producing a universal family album. The exhibition, built from good images, replaced the historical family of man with myth, nature and work was replaced by common gestures.
Also in Frank’s subjective family album, alongside each other, are the images of people from different countries and nations. They are not however detached from their context to become “symbols of humanity”; for him they are simply documents of lives lived.
The same dedication to fundamental things can also be read in his short texts, he doesn’t mystify photography: You can photograph anything now.
The Americans, better than a show
`That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from nearby funeral, that´s what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he travelled on the road around forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film … After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.´
This is how the beat guru Jack Kerouac began his radient introduction to Robert Frank’s photographic book “The Americans”, which was first published (1958) in France with the title “Les Americains”. (But without Kerouac´s introduction, which was part of English edition in 1959; this added by editor)
When the american audience had the chance to see the book in 1959, it received an extreme reaction. Its view was seen as an anguished protest and the images as empty bubbles.
It took a long time until the same people,who had given Frank the grants that ensured him to shoot his work, came over the shock. They didn’t recognize their own soil in the pictures; the flip side of whitmanesque humanism, a graveyard of the western world growing and furthering it’s wealth – America.
For young people however, the book became a visual equivalent to Kerouac’s “On the Road”, and by no means least due to Kerouac’s preeminent prologue Frank, the comet of photography, was made a permanent star by the book.
Pictures of Americans
The subject matter of the book wasn’t anything new as such. Walker Evans’ “American Photographs”, published in the 1930s, can even be seen as an iconographic precedent to Frank’s book.
Both of them focused on depicting public places: squares, barber shops, junk yards, beaches etc. acting as locations for national rituals.
In both of the books americanism is put under a cross lighting characteristic to photography, where the silent beauty of human comedy and the tangible foundation of culture form in an instant a recognizable milieu – a time recording landscape of the soul.
Frank’s method – two years on the road – was definitely a challenge as such.
In the contrasts of the book a full-bodied overture is an image of people hiding behind the American flag. Then follow the images of collective functions and festivities; a distressed parade in New Jersey, a black funeral in South Carolina and a dusty rodeo in Detroit: “An artist must take seriously everything people do.”
The dramaturgical factor in the book is the road, being on the road. Straight as an arrow the U.S. 285 leads glowingly on to the dusky deserts, with two hitchhikers photographed from the side on the back seat of a car, and then the ice cold rain of sleet by the U.S. 66; lying on the side of the road covered with a coarse blanket, two bodies, victims of a car accident. Watching the scene, four Navajo indians frozen from the cold. The contrasts of races, of cultures, of the photographer and his subjects, the tragedy of the situation, sheer sorrow underneath.
The message in Frank’s images is always just as topical in the artificially accelerated cycle of decades of the western world. Each generation of young photographers experience it in their own way, discovering street photography, a compact camera and dream of THE JOURNEY, that could remain in the history of photography.
The foam on top of Frank’s photographs, the style, has significantly influenced the way photography is seen today. But the intensity of his work – a strange combination of Flaneur, the European traveller and Philip Marlowe, a hard nosed private eye from the west coast – is an inimitable distributor in the engine of modern art.
Life dances on
A few years after publishing “The Americans” Frank started making films: first one was a portrayal of the beatnik community, titled “Pull My Daisy”.
“When making films, I look around me just as before, but I’m no longer a solitary observer who turns away after the shutter is released. In stead I have to recreate what I see, hear, feel. There is no decisive moment, I have to do everything I can to make what is relevant happen in front of the camera…”
In the mid seventies emerged the last photographic body of work made public: a collection of images titeled “The Lines of My Hand”.
It is a beautiful look at a twenty-five-year-long search for the right path: its photographs are postcards from everywhere., memories of a world dissapeared. Family, children, ex-wife Mary, no separation of personal life from the subjects of the images.
In one of the images Mary is standing on a beach. The shadow of the photographer casts a dual portrait on her face, the sea as a backdrop.
The last picture is from a new home in Nova Scotia. A panoramic view of the sea: ” The ice is melting, water is warming up, turning blue and warm, the hills become green…”
TANELI ESKOLA
Taneli Eskola wrote his Doctoral thesis in photography at University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki in 1997.