Foreword

This text by Shahrzad Kamel, Director of The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, originally appears in Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions, available via Pace Publishing.

The exhibition title Hope Makes Visions comes from a sketch by Robert Frank illustrating his work Fire Below – to the East America, Mabou (1979; p. 20). The sketch was included in a bequest Frank made of his photographs and papers to The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation upon his death in 2019. It is one of many discoveries that inspired the idea to build an exhibition around previously unseen works from Frank’s oeuvre. The exhibition was further developed through a process of piecing together scattered fragments, or “variants,” of photographs from Frank’s archive that were spread across numerous print boxes and have been preserved in their original order. The resulting groupings of works inform one another and will enrich the Foundation’s future institutional disbursements. Hope Makes Visions is meant to deepen our understanding of Frank’s later work, his process, and his motivations. An artist who mastered his craft at an early age, he spent the latter years of his life illuminating it.

Frank began using a Polaroid Land Camera in 1972 and subsequently experimented with many different cameras and printing processes, several of them on display in this exhibition and included in this publication. A few years later, Frank began making multi-image enlargements on gelatin silver paper using Polaroid positive/negative film. He continued to use the instant film process rigorously until the end of his life, and he compiled and sometimes categorized Polaroids in albums. Other times he used them to make maquettes for larger pieces, as with Possessions and Souvenirs from Flamingo, Goteborg (1997; p. 74) and Pangnirtung, N.W.T. (1992; p. 69). In addition to etching and scratching into Polaroid negatives, a technique we see clearly in Halifax Infirmary (1978; p. 23), he did the same at times with the positives. On three Polaroids, we can see he was practicing writing the word “cement” in different styles for the work Seament Cement It Is Like Me, Mabou (1979; p. 43). On another, he etched across it a series of horizontal lines, a gesture that reoccurs throughout many works on view. 

There are elements in this collection of works that point to the tactility of Frank’s process and his use of multimedia. A piece of glass with the words “Monuments of Glory and Regret” etched on the surface shows one way Frank’s words and writing were exposed onto gelatin silver paper during the printing process. To make his multi-image enlargements, Frank cut or ripped and then taped pieces of gelatin silver paper together, sometimes using another substrate as backing. This created a printer template for a multi-image work, seen in the fragments exhibited from WAS IST DAS, Mabou (1995; p. 52), Monday Morning in Mabou, Old Snapper(1998; p. 50), and Los Angeles – February 4th – I Wake Up – Turn on TV (1979; p. 41).

Hope Makes Visions reveals common threads in Frank’s work and makes evident his reuse of imagery over the years. Time is discontinuous, and Frank’s impulse to use older photographs and re-work them into something new extends throughout the installation. In January 1993, Frank wrote about a dream he had in Cairo in which “everyone was still alive, the way I remember them 30 years ago.” That same year, he made I Want to Escape (1993; p. 37) a stacked, multi-image diptych with added text. He selected two photographs from 1955 and one from 1956 taken in Memphis, Tennessee, and Lux, Wyoming, respectively. The text on the unseen fragments of I Want to Escape suggests Frank was thinking about his dream while working on this piece. Later, in 2004, he made the short film True Story, a collage of older films with new footage that begins with video he shot in his hotel room in Cairo, the morning after his dream. By piecing together these fragments, we can point to the atemporal nature of Frank’s work across media.

The silent film Moving Pictures (1994) features a quote by the artist: “I have an obsession in my life for fragments that reveal and hide truth.” The hope now is that by exhibiting unseen fragments, other truths are revealed, expanding our understanding and study of the multi-dimensional work and life of Robert Frank.