http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/magazine/robert-franks-america.html?smid=nytimesphoto&_r=0
This is a wonderful article about Robert Frank who is one of the greatest living photographers today. If you don't like Frank's work then you......
This is a wonderful article about Robert Frank who is one of the greatest living photographers today. If you don't like Frank's work then you......
9 comments:
... you don't like potry, see?
Well, I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I really don't like Frank's work. He is a disgruntled European with the typical European disdain for Americans and our culture (notwithstanding that if we had not saved their bacon twice in the previous 50 or so years there would have been no European culture -- just a German one). Frank was unable to see anything good in America; only the ugly and the tawdry, and his distorted view led generations to focus on what is wrong with America, and never what is good and right with it.
This is not to disparage Frank's ability as a photographer. If he had not been such a great photographer, he could not have been so influential.
On this one Dave, we will have to be diametrically opposed. I think his honest visual assessment was a catharsis that moved our country one step closer to civilization. And I think he was a screaming great artist, all social issues aside.
...should not look back. What's there will be incomprehensible.
I'm startled by the idea that The Americans contains only the ugly and the tawdry. This is just wrong.
It contains nobility and goodness, as well. Admittedly, it is often embodied in people with dark skin.
Wealth and power do not come off too well, to be sure. But I can think that too is a very American ideal.
I had no idea Frank was not an American until I read the cited piece (OK, I'm a bit of a rube) and would have guessed that he was American because the book is so intensely true to America. It doesn't have any of the archness I associate with European work. It's Evans meets Beat, to my eye.
I'm late into the photo book game. The last one I read was a book by Richard Avedon late last year. Now I need to check out "The Americans". That photo of the various faces on the trolley is incredible.
"When Frank embarked to photograph “The Americans”, he traveled over 10,000 miles across 30 states in 9 months. Upon returning to New York in the June of 1956, he spent nearly a year developing his 767 rolls of film, making contacts sheets from which he made 1000 work prints. After that, he refined his selection and then established the sequence for the book."
Maybe this is why I see very little that equals Frank's work in the digital age.
I was a freshman in college while Frank was making his journey. I know those days; I know the people of those times. I stand by my assessment of Frank's perspective.
There's room for differences of opinion on the work of Robert Frank. But there can only be kudos for the author of the NYTimes feature. He managed to use "apotheosis" and "crepuscular" in the same piece. Not many people can get away with that.
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