Robert Frank: Finally In Focus

Robert Frank’s 1958 photography book The Americans was scorned by the general public and his artistic peers at the time for its gloomy portrayal of American life. Over time, however, it gained recognition for its lucid dissection and rejection of American optimism. As the book received critical acclaim, Frank began to resent the limits it placed on his art; the public expected the same social insights that characterized The Americans in his future work, which he found immensely restrictive, ultimately leading him to abandon photography for some time. Instead, Frank turned to film, documenting cultural icons and capturing snapshots of his everyday life in New York City and Nova Scotia through free-form, improvisational documentaries. 

To many, Frank’s transition from photographer to filmmaker was jarring; it seemed like he was abandoning a medium that had brought him enormous success in favor of one in which he had little experience or credibility. MoMA’s retrospective, Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, challenges this perception, identifying the continuities between Frank the photographer and Frank the filmmaker. Curator Lucy Gallun pulls from Frank’s work over six decades, including the iconic street photographs from The Americans, as well as his films, oft-overlooked later photographs, and mixed media collages.

Unlike previous exhibitions, which sought to understand America through Frank’s photographic lens, Life Dances On attempts to understand Frank himself through his own work. Gallun weaves together remnants of Frank’s creative process alongside the works and ideas of his contemporaries and friends to flesh out the man behind the camera. She traces the influences and ideas that inspired his films and collages throughout his early photographs and experiments, linking his vastly different bodies of work. 

The exhibition opens with a row of black-and-white prints documenting scenes of life and waste across Coney Island. In one small print, a woman extends herself on a grimy beach beneath the towering metal obelisk of the Coney Island Parachute Jump; in another, a figure wrapped in white lies across the beach, strewn with trash, while a couple embraces in the distance. Individually disparate, these prints come together to form a cohesive portrait of alienation and human insignificance. As the opening act of the exhibition, these portraits introduce one of Frank’s defining strengths: his ability to find unity and meaning in the seemingly disparate.

Gallun places one of Frank’s early video experiments—a whimsical short film in which men in flowing costumes ascend a sand dune only to tumble down into the arms of a woman clad in Ancient Greek garb—right beside his early somber, pensive photographs. This juxtaposition invites viewers to consider the similarities between Frank’s approach to film and photography. In each medium, he uses proximity—spatial in the case of his photographs and temporal in his video work—to conjure meaning from the seemingly random. In a reflection on his use of video as a medium that Gallun includes in the wall text, Frank explained, “When I selected the pictures and put them together I knew and I felt that I had come to the end of a chapter. And in it was the beginning of something new.” Here, Frank described the ability that video gives him to assemble photos into a sequence, but he just as well could have been describing the ability that photography gives him to place images side by side. This ambiguity exists because, for Frank, these actions were analogous; he approached both mediums with the same desire to create thought-provoking contrast and comparison between the seemingly unrelated.

In Gallun’s attempt to bring Frank’s creative process to life, the physical evidence and remnants of his creative process are just as important as his finished pieces. Gallun includes the storyboards and film rolls for Frank’s early films alongside video projections of the finished products. Many of these pieces are covered in markings and notes in vibrant red ink, which indicate where he wanted to alter and cut his film. As the exhibition progresses, Frank’s comments creep into his final works as he marks up collages of photos of his friends and even edits and disfigures old editions of his photo books that he felt didn’t reflect his current sensibility.

Much of Frank’s later work features his edits or alterations, either covered in writing or assembled into a collage. His later multimedia pieces also maintain their connection to film and the creative process that he used for his video projects. “Home Improvements” (1985) is a series of five stills from Frank’s video project of the same name. The stills, which depict the pained faces of his family members alongside their natural environment, are captured off of a CRT television set, giving them a slight bluish hue. Below the stills, Frank names the individuals and the places they inhabit in the same bright red script that he used to edit his rolls of film. Strikingly similar to the storyboards that accompanied Frank’s films, “Home Improvements” illustrates the influence of Frank’s creative process throughout his career on his latest work.

In subject matter, his later works diverge from the street portraits of The Americans to more vulnerable images of his immediate surroundings and the objects and characters that animate his day-to-day life. In the latter third of the exhibition, Gallun selects intimate photographs of flowers and outstretched hands inscribed with quotes and names that pay homage to Frank’s deceased children. These gentle yet tragic works reflect a deep shift in Frank’s focus. Initially interested in the discord and anguish of the American society that surrounded him, he, near the end of his career, began documenting his own pain. In an interview, Frank explained that after the success of The Americans, he began to search for “something more interior, related to my sentimentality” in his art. 

These late works reveal a man whose internal struggles long remained insulated from outward-facing critiques of culture and society. By donating all of his films and nonphotographic work, Frank entrusted MoMA to honor his legacy, not just as a photographer but as a complete artist. Gullen, in her sensitive curation of works from Frank’s expansive career, succeeds in honoring his legacy and remaining true to the principles that animated his art throughout his entire career.