Outside the door. There he stood most of the time, when people talked about him in press conferences, in clever debates on his work: Robert Frank distrusted words. the art was, what he was doing? Should others say the. It interested never, “to be state of the art”. Or in the centre of some excited interest.

His photos, his films were for the moment: for the moment, the show, and for those to be seen at the you. Volatility as a principle and out of principle, as a confession of faith. No big images, no significant moments. For what is cinema, photography should be good, if not, to show the force of the Banal? Robert Frank’s images are and have always been souls-images, and to revelation, especially the end of his life open his own inner world.

How such a melancholic head to such a myth could be, as a “living legend”, as you worshipped him today? One of the most influential photographers of the post-war period and the under-rated Underground film-maker?

Born in 1924 in Zurich, the son of a stateless become Jewish interior designer from Frankfurt, the mother was a born girl from Basel, Switzerland – how lucky to find a da? In America, you want to be found, in the country as a promise of happiness, in which you decided at the age of 23 to emigrate!

14th Street White Tower, New York, 1948. For more images from “The Americans” in our photo Blog. Image: Swiss Foundation for photography

in fact, Robert Frank rare happiness in his life. His daughter died young, an accidental death; the son suffered from a mental illness. But with all the bad luck: Robert Frank blessed with Talent. With great composition skills, his sense for the Fragility of the life he has led photography into the Modern age.

A shock, a flash of lightning, it was “Les Américains,” a society portrait in the Form of a narrow booklet with 83 shots, as it appeared in may 1958. No American publisher wanted to touch the hot goods, which ventured only a Frenchman, Robert Delpire. Everything was wrong, because everything was different at this kind of photography, quite apart from what could be seen on her: endless, desolate, long Highways, in the province of architecture, lonely people.

His rise to photo Bible for all the Future had begun.

Frank used the wrong exposures, coarse grain, and from the Lot of the fallen image horizons. Be America, distilled, counted from his one – year journey through the 48 States – as you will later tell, the detours, out of 687 movies, 27’000 shots, this is America, a country was to fall out of Balance, a country in Black and White.

And Black-and-White only one thing in Common were sadness: a large. Frank had to pay for the production of the image bands $ 200 in advance, a lot of money (if you don’t have it), a sum that was growing at the end of the year to 800 dollars – this time it was sold out the book already.

His rise to photo Bible for all the Future had begun. As a visual artist took in his image of language Woodstock anticipation, a new, free understanding of photography, and the avant-garde in Europe, appointed him mainly to the realm of the giants.

It was Robert Frank has not harmed because it has not taken care of. Prior to that, he had already created two artist’s books, one about Peru (1948), and he had portrayed in his home in the rural community in Switzerland (1949), the city of London (1951) and a mining village in Wales, (1953). In it, he, what made him really interested in the showed that It was the mix of fiction and reality, which was a poetic realism to the track, but never made a secret of that to him, ultimately, to the people and whose life circumstances.

New York City, 1955. Image: photo Foundation Switzerland, Swiss Confederation, Federal office for culture (BAK), Berne

Even in the ‘ 50s, he photographed in New York passers-by as a small photo series and named it after the place of their origin: “From the Bus” (1958). It is Frank’s last serial photo work in the classical sense, its departure from the static single-image. Now he will repeat the Film – and video camera in Hand to, as he says, to escape danger, as a photographer.

Robert Frank as a film Director and camera man: Chapter one, in need of refurbishment, as the fact of Frank as a filmmaker, is an underground phenomenon remained. Be part of the beginning is a legend: With the poetic words, “Early morning in the universe” opened in the voice of Jack Kerouac “Pull My Daisy” (1959), Frank’s most famous short film. Developed Kerouac’s verbal Jazz Performance of the strip as an inside look of the Beatniks-feeling in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

“Pull My Daisy” from 1959. Video: Vimeo

not to say The first feature-length Film at the end of the 60s, “Me and My Brother”, a complicated, perhaps too complicated project; later, the tour document on the Rolling Stones, “Cocksucker Blues” (1972), likewise with little success, to: devastating unsuccessful. In the Mercantile sense, at least. In an artistic point of view film will have to speak to a historian, your judgment still.

Robert Frank did not want to wait, he continued to work. Now, again using the Medium of photography. His work revolved increasingly more his own, for the losses in his family, sought to be lost, for the he images. “Sick of good-Bys” is it on a Window, thick as written in blood; on another picture, he hangs photos on the clothesline in front of his house in Vermont with nothing but the vocabulary of “Words”.

Outside, in front of the door fluttered, this leaves with the Wind. A message that has a recipient. Outside the door is also the location of Robert Frank, who looked up with a sceptical view on what we call the world. On Monday, Robert Frank, at the age of 94 years, passed away in the canadian Inverness.

Created: 10.09.2019, 16:48 PM