R
obert Frank, one of the most influ-
ential photographers of the 20th
century, whose visually raw and
personally expressive style was
pivotal in changing the course of docu-
mentary photography, died on Monday in
Inverness, N.S. He was 94.
His death, at Inverness Consolidated
Memorial Hospital on Cape Breton Island,
was confirmed by Peter MacGill, whose
Pace-MacGill Gallery in New York has rep-
resented Mr. Frank’s work since 1983. Mr.
Frank, a Manhattan resident, had long had
a summer home in Mabou, on Cape Breton
Island.
Born in Switzerland, Mr. Frank emigrat-
ed to New York at the age of 23 as an artistic
refugee away from what he considered to
be the small-minded values of his native
country. He was best known for his
groundbreaking book,The Americans,a
masterwork of black-and-white photo-
graphs drawn from his cross-country road
trips in the mid-1950s and published in
1959.
The Americanschallenged the presiding
mid-century formula for photojournalism,
defined by sharp, well-lit, classically com-
posed pictures, whether of the battlefront,
the homespun American heartland or mo-
vie stars at leisure. Mr. Frank’s photo-
graphs – of lone individuals, teenage cou-
ples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of
cultural life – were cinematic, immediate,
off-kilter and grainy, like early television
transmissions of the period. They would
secure his place in photography’s panthe-
on. Cultural critic Janet Malcolm called
him the “Manet of the new photography.”
But recognition was by no means im-
mediate. The pictures were initially con-
sidered warped, smudgy, bitter. Popular
Photography magazine complained about
their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy ex-
posures, drunken horizons, and general
sloppiness.” Mr. Frank, the magazine said,
was “a joyless man who hates the country
of his adoption.”
Mr. Frank had come to detest the Amer-
ican drive for conformity, and the book
was thought to be an indictment of Amer-
ican society, stripping away the picture-
perfect vision of the country and its veneer
of breezy optimism put forward in maga-
zines and movies and on television. Yet at
the core of his social criticism was a ro-
mantic idea about finding and honouring
what was true and good about the United
States.
“Patriotism, optimism, and scrubbed
suburban living were the rule of the day,”
Charlie LeDuff wrote about Mr. Frank in
Vanity Fair magazine in 2008. “Myth was
important then. And along comes Robert
Frank, the hairy homunculus, the Europe-
an Jew with his 35-mm. Leica, taking snaps
of old angry white men, young angry black
men, severe disapproving southern ladies,
Indians in saloons, he/shes in New York al-
leyways, alienation on the assembly line,
segregation south of the Mason-Dixon
Line, bitterness, dissipation, discontent.”
Les Americains, first published in France
by Robert Delpire in 1958, used Mr. Frank’s
photographs as illustrations for essays by
French writers. In the American edition,
published the next year by Grove Press,
the pictures were allowed to tell their own
story, without text – as Mr. Frank had con-
ceived the book.
Mr. Frank may well have been the un-
witting father of what became known in
the late 1960s as “the snapshot aesthetic,”
a personal, offhand style that sought to
capture the look and feel of spontaneity in
an authentic moment. The pictures had a
profound influence on the way photogra-
phers began to approach not only their
subjects but also the picture frame.
Mr. Frank’s aesthetic – as much about
his personal experience of what he was
photographing as about the subject mat-
ter – was given further definition and legit-
imacy in 1967 in the seminal exhibition
New Documents at the Museum of Mod-
ern Art in New York. The show presented
the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander
and Garry Winogrand, who at the time
were relatively little-known younger-gen-
eration beneficiaries of Mr. Frank’s pio-
neering style. The show established all
three as important American artists.
Robert Louis Frank was born in Zurich
on Nov. 9, 1924, the younger son of well-to-
do Jewish parents. His mother, Regina, was
Swiss, but his father, Hermann, a German
citizen who became stateless after the First
World War, had to apply for Swiss citizen-
ship for himself and his two sons.
Safe in neutral Switzerland from the
Nazi threat looming across Europe, Mr.
Frank studied and apprenticed with
graphic designers and photographers in
Zurich, Basel and Geneva. He became an
admirer of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who co-
founded the photo-collective Magnum in
1947 and whose photographs set the stan-
dard for generations of photojournalists.
Mr. Frank would later reject Mr. Cartier-
Bresson’s work, saying it represented all
that was glib and insubstantial about pho-
tojournalism. He believed that photojour-
nalism oversimplified the world, mimick-
ing, as he put it, “those goddamned stories
with a beginning and an end.”
Early on, Mr. Frank caught the eye of
Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary maga-
zine art director, who gave him assign-
ments at Harper’s Bazaar. Over the next 10
years, Mr. Frank worked for Fortune, Life,
Look, McCall’s, Vogue and Ladies’ Home
Journal.
Restless, he travelled to London, Wales
and Peru from 1949 to 1952. From each trip,
he assembled spiral-bound books of his
pictures and gave copies to, among others,
Mr. Brodovitch and Edward Steichen, then
the director of photography at the Mu-
seum of Modern Art.
Walker Evans’s bookAmerican Photo-
graphs, which was not well known in the
1950s, may have been the greatest influen-
ce on Mr. Frank’s landmarkAmericanspro-
ject.
“When I first looked at Walker Evans’
photographs,” he wrote in the U.S. Camera
Annual in 1958, “I thought of something
Malraux wrote: ‘to transform destiny intoawareness.’ One is embarrassed to want so
much of oneself.”
While the photographs inThe Ameri-
cansare the most widely acknowledged
achievement of Mr. Frank’s career, they
can be seen as a prelude to his subsequent
artistic work, in which he explored a varie-
ty of mediums, using multiple frames,
making large Polaroid prints, video imag-
es, experimenting with words and images
and shooting and directing films, such as
Candy Mountain(1988), an autobiograph-
ical road film directed with Rudy Wurlitz-
er.
Still, it isThe Americansthat will prob-
ably endure longer than anything else he
did. In 2007, he consented to hang all 83 of
the book’s photographs at the Pingyao In-
ternational Photography Festival in China,
in celebration of the book’s 50th anniver-
sary. And, in 2009, the National Gallery of
Art in Washington mounted “Looking In:
Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans,’ ” an ex-
haustive and comprehensive retrospective
of his masterwork, organized by Sarah
Greenough. The show travelled to the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Mr. Frank acknowledged that in photo-
graphing Americans he found the least
privileged among them the most compell-
ing.
“My mother asked me, ‘Why do you al-
ways take pictures of poor people?’ ” Mr.
Frank told Nicholas Dawidoff in The Times
Magazine. “It wasn’t true, but my sympa-
thies were with people who struggled.
There was also my mistrust of people who
made the rules.”NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICEROBERTFRANK
PHOTOGRAPHER,94PIONEERINGARTIST
REVOLUTIONIZEDHISMEDIUM
PhotographerRobertFrank’srepresentationsofeverydayAmericanawouldsecurehisplace
intheartform’spantheon.CulturalcriticJanetMalcolmoncedescribedhimasthe‘Manetof
thenewphotography.’DODOJIN MING/THE NEW YORK TIMESMr.Franksaid‘itwasn’t
true’thathedirectedhis
attentionprimarilyon
thepoorestsubjects.
‘Butmysympathies
werewithpeoplewho
struggled,’headded.Above:Trolley—
NewOrleans(1955).Left:Charleston,South
Carolina(1955).
PHOTOSBYROBERT
FRANK/COURTESY
PACE-MacGILLVIA NYTBestknownforhis1959book,
TheAmericans,hisraw,
expressiveblack-and-white
imageswouldgoonto
initiateaseachangein
documentaryphotography
PHILIPGEFTER
Born March 23, 1926, in Ukraine;
died May 16, 2019, in Ottawa, of
cancer and Alzheimer’s; aged 93.‘T
here are a lot of bad peo-
ple in this world,” Halyna
Dobrowolsky would of-
ten say, “but there are also a lot of
good people.” Haylna was one of
the best.
She was the only daughter in a
well-to-do family with four chil-
dren, and spent her formative
years happy and carefree in Ko-
wel, Western Ukraine. The Second
World War and Soviet occupation
changed everything. Halyna be-
came involved in the under-
ground resistance movement. As
a result, she and one of her broth-
ers were forced to flee, first to
Poland and then to Austria. She
travelled barefoot to preserve the
soles of her shoes, as worn-out
shoes were a dangerous giveaway
for a refugee. She became separat-
ed from her brother, and later
learned that he had been killed by
the Red Army. The rest of her
family were sent to Siberia, and
they would never be reunited. Ha-
lyna never learned the fate of her
eldest brother. For the rest of her
life, she would search for him in
the phone book of every town she
visited.
Halyna met and married Jus-
tyn Dobrowolsky in a refugee set-
tlement in Vienna, and then wait-
ed while he immigrated to Cana-
da to work in the indentured
logging camps in Quebec and On-
tario to earn funds for her fare.
She arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax in- Once reunited, the couple
eventually moved to Sudbury,
where Justyn found work at the
INCO nickel mines.
In Sudbury, they started a fam-
ily, which was challenging with-
out a support network. While still
caring for her newborn and preg-
nant with her second child, Haly-
na was in a car accident, which
knocked out her teeth and broke
her arm and ankle. Although in-
jured, she continued to work tire-
lessly while she healed, some-
times washing the floors by scoot-
ing on her behind, pregnant and
holding her newborn.
Halyna was a selfless mother
with limitless affection. Owning
only a couple of books, she took
her children to the public library
each week, travelling by local bus
and then walking a kilometre.
This practice fostered a lifelong
love of reading in all three of her
daughters. Never forgetting her
hunger during the war, Halyna
vowed to never let her children go
without food and helped feed lo-
cal families in need. She worked a
massive vegetable garden and
picked blueberries and mush-
rooms from the rocky Sudbury
hills. A self-taught foodie, she
spoiled family and friends with
sorrel borscht, cheesenalesniki
(crêpes), fabulous pierogis,
smoked and barbecued meats
and blueberry pie. Jars of pre-
serves overflowed from the base-
ment into the bedrooms.
Outside of the home, she held
multiple jobs, including as a chef
at Eaton’s in Sudbury. With what-
ever small savings they had, Haly-
na and Justyn would send pack-
ages to relatives in Ukraine.
Halyna’s faith was always a
comfort, and she spent hours vol-
unteering and preparing feasts at
the Ukrainian churches in Sudbu-
ry and then Ottawa, where she
moved as a widow in 2001.
Through the church, she always
befriended newcomers, support-
ing them in their transition to life
in Canada.
Halyna was warm and humble
and extremely grateful to live in
Canada. Despite the heartache
and trauma of war, which Halyna
would always carry, her strongest
characteristics remained her
grace and positivity.
Kalina McCaul is Halyna’s
granddaughter.LIVESLIVED
HALYNADOBROWOLSKYUkrainian-
Canadian.
Mama.
Prababusya.
Friend.
HalynaDobrowolsky.B18 OBITUARIES O THEGLOBEANDMAIL | WEDNESDAY,SEPTEMBER11,2019
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