The Elegiac Genius of Robert Frank

This essay originally appears in Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions, available via Pace Publishing.

Though widely known for The Americans—the seminal monograph of eighty-three photographs that challenged and altered the role of the medium in the twentieth century—Robert Frank was, at his core, a multimedia artist for whom the camera was but another tool, replete with possibility and limitations. He used the camera not as a signifier for artistic identity but rather as a wand, his subjects transformed then transfixed into netherworlds, their faces blurred or rendered immutable through his hallmark under-exposures and (seemingly) serendipitous compositions that defined a style whose imitators are now legion.

Frank’s ability to see America so clearly has often been attributed to his being a foreigner. But I feel this is a disservice to Frank’s capacity to see through cultural barriers. America has had many visitors and outsiders—it is, at its core, a nation of outsiders—but few have reckoned with its soul the way Frank has. No, he doesn’t see America anew because he’s an outsider but because, like any steadfast artist, he’s damn good at looking at the world. His eclectic and singular work is tinged with durable and brooding elegiac tones; the ruins he often captures, the sick and failing bodies, as seen in the Halifax Infirmary series showing his view as a patient, are mimetic of the crumbling inner-self that is the touchstone of twentieth-century culture.

The tendency to fetishize our artists as preternatural wunderkinds often denies their deliberate, calculated aesthetic choices. And while Frank’s study of the ghoulish underbelly of post-war America was idiosyncratic, it’s helpful to see his images in consort with other mid-century artistic movements. Frank arrived in America from Switzerland in 1947, a time when American art was desperately seeking new paths to articulate the despair and grief that, after the hellscape of World War II, made clear that America, too, was a land of ruined promises. Responses to this existential miasma quickly appeared from artists like Edward Hopper, Horace Pippin, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Helen Levitt, and Paul Strand, all of whom offered more sobering, austere ideas of innovation when the nineteenth-century’s Impressionist avant-garde, with its pastel, dappled light, its poppies and water lilies, became increasingly canonical, if not outright bourgeois.

The 1950s and ’60s experienced both outer and inner deliriums, colonial war, environmental tragedies, Jim Crow and segregation, and the rise of suburban conformity and family values against the backdrop of a nation starving for intellectual, sexual, and gender freedoms. It is no surprise that Frank would be influenced, and influence in turn, the Beat poets—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs—whose harsh and existential themes of modern life resemble the very faces in Frank’s frames. What becomes clear is that Frank’s techniques—photographing indoors without flash, shooting from the hip, heavy grain, and centering maimed and marginalized subjects often deemed taboo—coincide with the Beats’ search for a poetry freed from the stuffy, polite, and allusion-bogged word games of academia.

The Beats, however, were not alone in this movement. LeRoi Jones, who would later become Amiri Baraka and a central figure in the revolutionary Black Arts Movement, was the founder of Yugen, a small literary magazine that published anti-establishment poetry from both the Beats and the New York School writers like Frank O’Hara and Barbara Guest, and featured art from Basil King and Norman Bluhm on its covers. Yūgen is one of the six Japanese aesthetic terms (two of which are the more well-known wabi and sabi) that roughly translate to a quality of dark, oblique fogginess that often beckons the viewer deeper into its subject. Applied both visually and psychically, yūgen manifests most notably in Japanese ink paintings, wherein deft, minimal brushstrokes suggest a landscape rather than depict it. The effect is also deployed in literature as unresolved plot lines or images whose motives remain enigmatic long after reading. The ethos of yūgen is perhaps the most consistent through line of Frank’s work, found in the grainy faces from his early frames all the way through his more personal, familial work in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.

Hope Makes Visions, which surveys Frank’s work from 1955 to 2016, robustly re-centers the artist as a seeker, not just of images but of meaning in all its manifestations. What one quickly realizes in this survey of Frank’s lesser-known work is that behind his eclectic corpus stands an artist who had the courage to disembark from his own achievements and notoriety and seek new methods, forms, and functions, proving that he is not just a photographer and filmmaker but a seer who asks the available material mediums, in whatever form, to render his subconscious shareable. Rarely does an artist as accomplished as Frank have such little dogmatic allegiance to his genre. Indeed, these pieces, which verge on sculpture, performance, documentary, and poetry, prove the abundance, not in the mediums themselves, but in the one who quests through and with them. In Memory of Destruction (1991), in which a city block in Beirut is shown after what appears to be a bombing, words are etched into the silver print using jagged script depicting, in photojournalist detail, what isnot in the image: “A foot is resting on a pile of rocks. A hand plays an old game with stones. . . . A torn frame from the shadow of a movie palace.” The effect is reminiscent of twelfth-century Chinese ink paintings, wherein calligraphy is applied to the landscape’s negative space. If the definition of photography is to “draw with light,” Frank uses photographs to paint with paper.

For an artist who clearly sought to invoke a response to an ever-changing world, what happens, then, if the tool of choice—in Frank’s case, the camera—is not enough? After the tragic death of his daughter, Andrea, Frank began to write and paint on his prints, at times scratching into them and superimposing
layers of images, colors, and words, ultimately expanding what might constitute an image—and what photography is for. This tactile intervention is an act reminiscent of the work of yet another poet, Emily Dickinson. Writing at the peak of the Civil War, Dickinson’s poems are characterized by deep, bold dashes, often at the end of their lines—as if to indicate a collapse or failure in language itself. When words no longer work, when meaning is beyond the quill, the typographical “cut” becomes more like calligraphy, wherein word and image began to blur or merge into absolute symbiosis.

As the scope of this show reveals, all of Frank’s subjects—be them land, time, memory, family and friends, fatherhood, and love—are upturned, surrendering their secrets to a maker who, for all the hurt and blight he captures, is, in the end, a man filled with delight for the human world. One gets the sense that, above all else, Frank roots for people, which is to say his subject of obsession is humanity: what it can do and what it has done to itself. This delight stands out, as in a bas-relief, from the pits of tremendous grief and loss. And this twinning of joy and grief is no clearer than in a scene in Don’t Blink (2015), a film on his life and work. Frank, while watching a clip of a street performer he had filmed decades earlier, laughs with childish glee at the human being in the frame. He then stops and turns away, the man known to many as a cranky, if cordial, curmudgeon, suddenly sheepish, his eyes filled with tears. “It’s nice how film survives,” he says. “It’s not the way photographs are. It’s still alive. A photograph is just a memory.” In this moment Frank observes the uniquely perennial power of the photograph: that it never completes itself. Unlike film, wherein the action is on a track of time, the photographic frame exists more like a line break in the lyric poem, that moment of pause and thought that occurs only after a rupture in linearity. It is a vexed and potent space, where possibility is both restricted and expanded at once, creating a centripetal pressure that belongs to all photographs and poems that haunt us.

It takes tremendous humility to allow yourself to be moved by your own work. And I’m convinced, as I hope all those who encounter this work are, that Frank, in the end, never “made work,” but rather offered us what’s already here, only turned inside out, transforming the sterilely mundane into something startlingly new. Maybe this is why, diverse and eclectic as this show is, it consistently holds Frank’s most central obsession: that no human epoch is built without sadness. And if it has any chance of rebuilding itself anew—it cannot do so without wonder.