Robert Frank

Robert Frank turned to filmmaking at the end of the 1950s. Although he has made 27 films, the work is largely a wellkept secret. Frank approaches each film project as a new experience, challenging the medium and its possibilities atevery turn. He has amalgamated documentary, fiction, and autobiography, cutting across genres. This book offers a visually unique approach to Frank¿s films: only new stills taken from videotapes have been used and they add up to a visual essay on Frank¿s cinema that establishes an engaging dialogue with his photographic work. Each film is introduced with detailed analysis, discussing the history and the aesthetics of Frank¿s film work. An interview with Allen Ginsberg provides an insider view. Together the texts and images offer an innovative and in-depth approach to the oeuvre of one of the greatest and most restless artists of the 20th century. Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1924 and went to the United States in 1947. He is best known for his seminal book The Americans (1958), which gave rise to a distinct new art form in the photo-book, and his experimental film Pull My Daisy (1959) both reproduced by Steidl within The Robert Frank Project.

In this, Robert Frank's newest book, he both acknowledges and moves beyond his acclaimed visual diaries (2010-17), which juxtapose iconic photos from throughout his career with the more personal pictures he makes today and suggestive, often autobiographical text fragments. In Good days quiet Frank's focus is life inside and outside his beloved weather-beaten wooden house in Mabou, where he has spent summers for decades with his wife June Leaf. Among portraits of Leaf, Allen Ginsberg and Frank's son are images of the house's simple interior with its wood-fueled iron stove, humble furniture and bare light bulbs, and views of the land and sea by the house: snow-covered, windswept, stormy or lit by the dying sun. Frank's Polaroid prints show various deliberate states of deterioration and manipulation at his hands, including texts that move from the merely descriptive ("watching the crows") to the emotive ("memories," "grey sea--old house / can you hear the music"). As always in Frank's books, his message lies primarily in the photos' lyrical sequence, an influential approach to the photobook pioneered by and today well at home in his 94-year-old hands. Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924 and immigrated to the United States in 1947. He is best known for his seminal book The Americans, first published in English in 1959, which gave rise to a distinctly new form of the photobook, and his experimental film Pull My Daisy (1959). Frank's other important projects include the books Black White and Things (1954), The Lines of My Hand (1972) and the film Cocksucker Blues for the Rolling Stones (1972). He divides his time between New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada.

"...merican Witness is the first comprehensive look at the life of a man who's as mysterious and evasive as he is prolific and gifted. Leaving his rigid Switzerland for the more fluid United States in 1947, Frank found himself at the red-hot social center of bohemian New York in the '50s and '60s, becoming friends with everyone from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky to photographer Walker Evans, actor Zero Mostel, painter Willem de Kooning, filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Bob Dylan, writer Rudy Wirlitzer, jazz musicians Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus, and more. Frank roamed the country with his young family, taking roughly 27,000 photographs and collecting 83 of them into what is still his most famous work: The Americans. His was an America nobody had seen before, and if it was harshly criticized upon publication for its portrait of a divided country, the collection gradually grew to be recognized as a transformative American vision.nd then he turned his back on certain success, giving up photography to reinvent himself as a film and video maker. Frank helped found the American independent cinema of the 1960s and made a legendary film with the Rolling Stones. Today, the nonagenarian is an embodiment of restless creativity and a symbol of what it costs to remain original in America, his life defined by never repeating himself, never being satisfied. American Witness is a portrait of a singular artist and the country that he saw."--Dust jacket

"From New York Times bestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, a revelatory look at the power and potential of social context. As psychologists have long understood, social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. Less widely noted is that social influence is a two-way street: Our environments are in large part themselves a product of the choices we make. Society embraces regulations that limit physical harm to others, as when smoking restrictions are defended as protecting bystanders from secondhand smoke. But we have been slower to endorse parallel steps that discourage harmful social environments, as when regulators fail to note that the far greater harm caused when someone becomes a smoker is to make others more likely to smoke. In Under the Influence, Robert Frank attributes this regulatory asymmetry to the laudable belief that individuals should accept responsibility for their own behavior. Yet that belief, he argues, is fully compatible with public policies that encourage supportive social environments. Most parents hope, for example, that their children won't grow up to become smokers, bullies, tax cheats, sexual predators, or problem drinkers. But each of these hopes is less likely to be realized whenever such behaviors become more common. Such injuries are hard to measure, Frank acknowledges, but that's no reason for policymakers to ignore them. The good news is that a variety of simple policy measures could foster more supportive social environments without ushering in the dreaded nanny state or demanding painful sacrifices from anyone"--

This book, based on the Frank collection at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, focuses on his American work. Its sequence of 131 plates integrates twenty-two photographs from "The Americans" with more than 100 images to chart the major themes and pictorial strategies of his work in the United States in the 1950s. The text reconsiders Frank's first photographic career and examines how he used the range of photography's 35mm vocabulary to reclaim the medium's artistic tradition from the hegemony of the magazines.

Containing photographs taken between 1948 and 1952, Black White and Things was in its original form a book hand-crafted by Robert Frank in 1952. Frank made three identical copies designed by Werner Zryd, each with spiral binding and original photographs. Printed for an exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington in 1994, Frank has now redesigned the book. Separated into three categories "black", "white", and "things", which are shaped more by mood than subject matter, the book traces Frank's travels to cities such as Paris, New York, Valencia and St. Louis. In the white section for instance, he brings photographs of vastly different motifs under a single aesthetic umbrella - his first wife reclining with their new-born baby, peasants squatting against a flaking wall in Peru, and a business man strolling past a snowdecked tree in London.

Paris A Short Return is the first time that the significant body of photographs which Robert Frank made in Paris in the early 1950s have been brought together in a single book. His visit to Paris in 1951 was his second return to Europe after he had settled in New York City in 1947 and some of the images he made during that visit have become iconic in the history of the medium. The 80 photographs selected by Robert Frank and Ute Eskildsen suggest that Franks experience of the new world had sharpened his eye for European urbanism. He saw the citys streets as a stage for human activity and focused particularly on the flower sellers. His work clearly references Atget and invokes the tradition of the flaneur. Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1924 and went to the United States in 1947. He is best known for his seminal book The Americans, first published in 1958, which gave rise to a distinct new art form in the photo-book, and his experimental film Pull My Daisy, made in 1959. His other important projects include the book Black White and Things, 1954, the book The Lines of My Hand, 1959, and the film Cocksucker Blues, 1972. He divides his time between New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada.