Arty Farty Friday ~ Robert Frank ~ Capturing Real Life

A look at another photographer this week: Robert Frank. His work is classed as "street photography". He's most famous for the photographs in his two books "The Americans", and "The Lines On My Hand".
(Portrait of Robert Frank, left, in his house in Nova Scotia1969-1971 by Walker Evans)






Born in Switzerland, he spent much of his adult life in America. He came to realise that the reality of America was (and is) far different from the myth, The American Dream. Nowadays this is more widely appreciated, though less well known in the 1950s when Mr Franks was wielding his camera throughout the states, depicting a vastly different story from that offered in some of Norman Rockwell's lovely illustrations. America had, and still has, two sides.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Franks seminal photo book The Americans, the National Gallery of Art organized a comprehensive exhibit of his work. Read more at Smithsonian.com

An unconsoling portrait of his adopted country, the 83 photographs in the book are a record of the Swiss-born Frank's on-the-road travels in 1955 and 1956. It is a country of empty highways and drained faces in barrooms, divided by race and income. Frank's people seem bereft, beaten. It's a portrait by an outsider identifying to his fingertips with other outsiders.

The pictures rewrote the rules of photography, and a comfortable living. Their blurry casualness and tilted frames jazzed nearly every photographer of note to come along in the 60's. Visual motifs hold "The Americans" together -- jukeboxes, crucifixes, cars, televisions -- and the Stars and Stripes flutters throughout the pages like a tattered ghost. The book galvanized successive waves of artists, and not just photographers. Tune in to any beautifully bleak, high-grain, low-definition MTV video and you're probably watching refracted Robert Frank.(From NYT Magazine)

Frank's photographs from Wales, England and elsewhere appear in his second book. His sharp insight, cuttingly critical at times, but with innate compassion and an artist's eye, provides much to enlighten future generations.






Born 9 November 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland. Time of birth unknown, 12 noon chart below.



It's a Watery chart, with Grand Trine linking and blending the Scorpio, Pisces and Cancer planets.
Here is incisive insight from Scorpio, compassion, sensitivity and artistic imagination from Cancer and Pisces. He has Fire energy too, sufficient to propel him to the success he achieved - this is reflected by his Aries Moon (whatever his time of birth), Jupiter in Sagittarius ( strong its own sign) and generational Neptune in Leo. Depending on time of birth the Fire planets could form a second Grand Trine.

The characteristics of his older years, described in the extract from Vanity Fair, below, stem from that Scorpio cluster, and possibly from his unknown ascending sign.

Frank Roberts is 84 now. From Vanity Fair (here)

"He has reached that age when a man does not have to apologize for his cruelties, his eccentricities, or his grooming habits. His prints have sold for more than a half-million dollars, but he shambles around looking like a Bowery bum. He has by turns been described by people who do not know him as ornery, reclusive, hard, manipulative to the point of destructive, and cold as a bowling ball. He rarely gives interviews. He speaks in short, elliptical snatches and views life with the detached outlook of an undertaker. He came to China to have a look before he dies. “To travel the road of possibilities,” he said. “Turn on a whole new audience.” "

"As he traveled around the country in 1955–56 making the photographs that would constitute his landmark book, The Americans, Frank's impression of America changed radically. He found less of the freedom and tolerance imagined by postwar Europeans, and more alienation and racial prejudice simmering beneath the happy surface. His disillusionment is poignantly embodied in this image of a disheveled African-American man disengaged from the crowd and asleep in a fetal position amid the debris of an Independence Day celebration on Coney Island."



This was one of the last still photographs Frank made before he devoted his creative energy to filmmaking in the early 1960s. As such, it may be interpreted as an elegy to still photography; the lone figure functions as a surrogate for Frank himself, as he turned his back on Life-like photojournalism to concentrate on the more personal, dreamlike imagery of his films."

"It's not the pretty or the sweet life, but the real life I looked for and got."(Robert Frank).