Celebrating the legacy of Robert Frank in 5 photos

Life spills out of Robert Frank’s photographs. Elegiac though unromantic, the Swiss photographer’s black-and-white film images came to stand for America itself; startling in their ability to embody a specific moment—even for a medium celebrated for its potential to suspend time. His eye for sincerity was as much a part of his continued success, as was his knack for capturing what Jack Kerouac would come to call the “humour, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness” in his written introduction to Frank’s work.

Trained as a commercial and film-still photographer in Switzerland in the early 1940s, Frank, who passed away on Monday, migrated to New York in 1947 and soon found work as a fashion photographer for magazine Harper’s Bazaar. This marked the start of a vertiginous career in his adopted home country. The physical fact of discontinuity, of his being both outsider and insider on a new continent afforded Frank—much like fellow photographer Diane Arbus—with a unique way of seeing things. Over the past half-century, his images have firmly entrenched themselves into our visual landscape. Here, in celebration of a man who changed the course of film photography, we look at five of Frank’s most arresting photos currently on view at Robert Frank: Unseen at C/O Berlin.

Capturing the realities of American life

Frank, his 35mm camera and a used black Ford Business Coupe were omnipresent throughout America between 1955 and 1956. Propelled into motion with the help of a Guggenheim grant, Frank spent years scouring the country—accompanied at times by his wife and two children— photographing all that he encountered. The resulting 27,000 photographs, or 600 rolls of film, were later whittled down and bound together in The Americans, an 83-photograph book widely considered one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century photography.

Furtively worried people, such as those depicted in San Francisco, were the bread and butter of Frank’s oeuvre. Throughout The Americans, hurried figures are depicted as turning away from the camera, caught between fleeting moments of sorrow and joy. Adopting a film-noir approach to photography, Frank photographed from the outskirts, peering almost voyeuristically from behind his camera to uncover newfound beauty in those who would be typically remain beyond the frame.

Documenting the rise of consumerism and modern leisure

Eyes closed, mouth stretched into an exhilarating grin, the young woman in this photograph, eternalised by Frank’s camera careering around in a bumper car with her companion, seemingly embodies pure Epicurean glee. Touching on recurring themes such as the rise of consumerism and the race towards modernity, what is most striking about this photograph is its ability to both pull the viewer in and to remind them that they are not included in the raucous couple’s gaudy spree around the amusement park.

Shining a light on racial segregation

Frank was hyper aware of the ways in which racial divisions had permeated American consciousness in the 1950s. Using the inbuilt partitions of the window frame, he draws attention to the racial segregation that riddled America in Trolley. His depiction of contemporary America was at odds with the current image that was being portrayed by Hollywood and the advertising industry; he exposed the callous indifference in wealth, the emptiness behind the American dream. Grainy and overexposed, often taken at lilting angles, his technique further brought to the surface the flaws beneath the very fabric of American society.

Yet—like the contradictory nature of the American dream itself—affect, appreciation and a sense of fondness for the characters and places that he photographed underpins much of his work.

Lensing the totemic items of American culture

The clatter of everyday life—from flags and jukeboxes, to automobiles, television sets and radios—appear through Frank’s lens as atrophied remnants of a bygone era. Mundane settings, such as the classic American diner or a near-abandoned parking lot, served as suitable backdrops to represent such totemic items of American popular culture. Frank had a distinctive knack for making the ‘extraordinary’ ordinary which firmly set the tone for with a style that would change the course of postwar photography.

Experimental approaches to photography

The shift in direction of Frank’s work from the 1970s onwards corresponded to a series of seismic changes in his personal life. Frank separated from his first wife in 1969 and shortly thereafter suffered several personal tragedies, including the disappearance and presumed murder of a close friend, the death of his daughter and his son being diagnosed with cancer.

A perceptible change in the focus of his work followed: Frank began to experiment with juxtaposition and collage, reframing photographs in new contexts. It was during this period of his life that he began working with Polaroid film, creating patchworks of images in a subtle nod to weary realisation of the camera’s inability to accurately represent truth.

Robert Frank: Unseen runs through to 30 November at C/O Berlin.

All images © Robert Frank . Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.