urban ku # 180 ~ myth and daggers

kodak cameras and film • click to embiggenThere is a wonderful article in Vanity Fair about Robert Frank. Like my recent viewing of the Ansel Adams film, I enjoyed the Frank piece because it's not really about photography per se. It's about Frank, the man.

Not that I ever doubted it, but the more I learn about photographers as persons, not as photographers, the more I am convinced that good/great photography comes from 'within'. Just about anyone can learn the craft of photography but only a relative handful (relative to the total number of photographers out there) can make good/great pictures. By the phrase, "good/great pictures", I mean those pictures that are rich with meaning for more than just the photographer him/herself. Pictures that will survive the test of time. Pictures that have power that does not necessarily reside in what they depict but, rather, communicate a vision that offers something to think about and maybe even an occasion for wonder.

Robert Frank is, quite obviously, one such person. A person who, when he pictured what it meant to be human in 1950s America, created a seminal work, The Americans, that changed the face of photography and laid bare the myth of America. When the book was first published in 1959, Frank's portrayal of the American landscape and street corners was so contrary to the prevailing American Myth that no American publisher would touch it - it was first published in France. The work was roundly panned by all manner of commentators including Popular Photography magazine which called the book a "meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness" and then went on to label Frank as "a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption." - a consummate act of denial and killing the messenger.

50 years later, the work is currently being republished for the 5th time and it is now being considered as the groundbreaking work - both as social commentary and photographic innovation - the really is/was. I like the comment from the VF piece which states that "... the genius lay in editing them (28,000 photographs) down to 83 daggers which he plunged directly into the heart of the Myth."

And, "... Before Frank, the visual orientation of photographs had been straight, horizontal, vertical. The subject of the picture was always obvious. You knew what the picture was about and what it meant to say. Frank, the shadowy little man, came along and changed the angles, made graininess a virtue, obscure lighting a benefit. His pictures were messy; you weren’t sure what to feel, who or what to focus on ... Frank intellectually changed photography—that is, what a photographer was supposed to look at. If Ansel Adams chose to capture the mightiness of nature, how could you argue with that? Where’s the fault in stone and sky and snow? There is no fault. And therein lies its fault. Frank snatched photography from the landscapists and the fashion portraitists and concentrated his lens on battered transvestites, women in housedresses, and sunken mouths. Life is not boulders and snow and perfume and chiffon. Life is difficult and sad and ephemeral. Life is flesh, not stone ..."

All of that said, here's what really interested me about Frank, the man.

He is quoted as saying about his children, "I wish I would have given them something ... their Jewishness or something." because, as he and the author of the piece agreed that the fantastic and fatal blessing of the American life [is] One can choose to be whatever one wants in America without the constraints of societal mores ... In America you might throw away ... old structures and live however you choose. But if you do not replace the old structure with a new one, this freedom will explode in your face like a car battery."

It should be noted that Frank states that "There was no agenda" when he set out on 3 successive Guggenheim grant-funded cross country car trips in the mid-50s. I don't doubt his words but I can't help but think that in his heart and soul he knew (an unthought known) that the American Myth was just that - a Myth. That, for a great many in America life, was indeed "difficult and sad and ephemeral". That in America, old structures and social mores had been thrown away not replaced with "something new". That, in fact, our freedom to live a life of the cult individuality had begun to "explode in the American face like a car battery".

What Frank did was nothing more than the seemingly simple act of picturing what he knew (consciously or not) to be true. There was "no agenda". The Americans was, in his words, "... a book of such simplicity." In fact, agenda-wise, He states that "It really doesn't say anything. It's apolitical. There's nothing happening in these photos ... I just went out into the streets and looked for interesting people."

It seems perfectly obvious to me that Frank was just being himself and the pictures flowed from within.

But there is one more very telling anecdote about Frank. When asked, "Do you carry any photographs in your wallet?”, Frank answered:

“One maybe.”

He removed his billfold from his back pocket, flipped through some receipts and a medical-insurance card. There it was. The only picture the master carried was a business-card photograph of Niagara Falls with block lettering underneath it that read, Niagara Falls, in case its holder should forget what it was he was looking at.

“It must be very beautiful, very romantic,” he said somewhat hopefully. As it turned out Robert Frank had never been to Niagara Falls. “Is it? Romantic?”

“Yes, quite romantic,” I lied. Let the old man be happy.

Kinda makes you wonder, despite what he knew to be true back in the 50s - ant, most likely, for his entire life, what it was he was looking for when he made all those pictures.

Comments

[Gordon McGregor]

I've been watching the recent BBC series 'the genius of photography' Probably my favourite episode was #5, with a variety of interviews with photographers. The whole set are worth seeing if you have the opportunity.

However, edition 4 had a fascinating recording of a press conference/interview with William Eggleston. he seemed a quite singular character.

On Frank's one photo, it almost reminds me of Pandora, with the hope of a romantic ideal that he carries around in his wallet, after all those daggers he'd been stabbing it with.