WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2019 The Boston Globe C11
Obituaries
By Mark Feeney
GLOBE STAFF
Robert Frank, whose 1958
book, “The Americans,”
changed the face of 20th-cen-
tury photography, died Mon-
day in Nova Scotia. He was 94.
The cause of death was not im-
mediately known.
As the novelist Jack Kerouac
wrote in his introduction to
“The Americans,” “Robert
Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive,
nice, with that little camera
that he raises and snaps with
one hand... sucked a sad po-
em right out of America onto
film, taking rank among the
tragic poets of the world.”
What Mr. Frank did in that
book was to take the leading
tradition of American photog-
raphy — the documentary tra-
dition, with its reverence for
the particular, of Timothy
O’Sullivan, Lewis Hine, and
Walker Evans — and enlarge it:
to emblematize the particular
and make it mythic.
As Mr. Frank wrote in his
application for the Guggen-
heim Fellowship that under-
wrote the photographic travels
that resulted in “The Ameri-
cans,” “ ‘The photographing of
America’ is a large order —
read at all literally, the phrase
wouldbeanabsurdity.WhatI
have in mind, then, is observa-
tion and record of what one
naturalized American finds to
see in the United States that
signifies the kind of civilization
born here and spreading else-
where.”
In the end, the book’s 83 im-
ages are about nothing so
much as American immensity,
a span of distance both inner
and outer. So many of the peo-
ple pictured in the book stare
off elsewhere. Rarely do they
look at one another, and almost
never into the camera. For all
that the book’s title suggests
otherwise, “The Americans” is
not about people. It’s about the
space that holds them.
“In this picture,’’ Evans
wrote of an image of an empty
highway, ‘‘US 285, New Mexi-
co,’’ ‘‘you instantly find the con-
tinent. The whole page is
haunted with American scale
and space, which the mind fills
in quite automatically.. .”
Five days after Mr. Frank ar-
rived in the United States, in
1947, he wrote home, “Nothing
is impossible here. They have
electric toothbrushes and nail
clippers.... In 10 minutes you
have eaten and there are three
men standing behind you,
waiting for you to leave... I
can only tell you this; you have
to see for yourself.” That sense
of discovery informs every im-
age in “The Americans,” as Mr.
Frank’s camera reveals a land
of highways and jukeboxes, un-
watched televisions and wav-
ing flags, mink stoles and mov-
ie premieres.
With his cool, disarmingly
hungry eye, Mr. Frank gath-
ered up America in a casual
embrace. Affecting neither ad-
vocacy nor scorn, he offered no
judgments on the continent-
sized country he was capturing
with his camera, no judgments
other than a kind of narrow-
eyed wonder.
At the time of the book’s
publication, many did not see
Mr. Frank’s work that way. A
Popular Photography reviewer
agreed with Kerouac on the po-
etic quality of “The Ameri-
cans”; but, put off by its often-
scruffy subject matter and
seemingly artless style, he de-
nounced “this sad poem for
sick people.” Six decades later,
the book looks vastly different:
Yesterday’s subversion has be-
come today’s unkempt appreci-
ation.
In addition, “The Ameri-
cans” profoundly influenced
the work of two generations of
photographers. The critic Janet
Malcolm likened its creator to
the painter who ushered in Im-
pressionism. Mr. Frank, she
wrote, was “the Manet of the
new photography.” What was
once a revolutionary document
now looks like a manual of late-
20th-century photographic
style.Inredefininganart form,
Mr. Frank had an impact on
photography comparable to
Marlon Brando’s on acting, a
few years earlier, and Bob Dy-
lan’s on popular music, a few
years later.
‘‘Never before,’’ the photog-rapher Joel Meyerowitz has
written of ‘‘The Americans,’’
‘‘was there a book of photo-
graphs with the wholeness of
literature and the clarity of a
poem. Many photographers of
my generation succumbed to
his vision and through it saw
the difficulties and potential of
photography and the adven-
ture in store for us were we to
misread that work in our own
inevitable ways.’’
The impact of Mr. Frank’s
work extended beyond photog-
raphy and film. “I’ve always
wished I could write songs the
way he takes pictures,” Bruce
Springsteen once said.
Robert Frank was born in
Zurich on Nov. 9, 1924, the son
of Hermann and Regina Frank.
His father was a German busi-
nessman who’d moved to Swit-
zerland after World War I. Mr.
Frank’s interest in the United
States and photography came
early. As a boy, he clipped a
photo of Franklin D. Roosevelt
and placed it over his bed. As a
teenager, he apprenticed him-
self to a local photographer and
got his first photographic job,
taking stills on a movie set,
when he was 17.
Mr. Frank immigrated to
the United States in 1947 and
was almost immediately hired
to work as a photographer for
the fashion magazine Harper’s
Bazaar. “I could feel the possi-
bilities,” he said nearly half a
century later of his first years
in New York. “You could do
anything, go anywhere; no-
body really cared.”
In 1950, he married the
sculptor Mary (Lockspeiser)
Frank. She and their two chil-
dren accompanied Mr. Frank
on parts of the 1955-56 cross-
country travels in a 1950 Fordthat produced “The Ameri-
cans.” It was a journey both
mundane (Mr. Frank went to
the American Automobile As-
sociation to plan his route)
and exotic (suspicious of his
accent, the Arkansas State Po-
lice sent his fingerprints to the
FBI).
In its combining the com-
monplace and extraordinary,
the journey was like something
out of Kerouac’s novel “On the
Road.” In fact, Mr. Frank col-
laborated with such Beat writ-
ers as Kerouac and Allen Gins-
berg. The best known of these
collaborations is the film “Pull
My Daisy,” made in 1959, and
Mr. Frank spent much of his
time in subsequent years mak-
ing experimental films. “When
you make a film, you have a
conversation,” he said in a 1994
New York Times interview.
“You have more contact with
people. When you photograph,
often you walk away.”
Film also had the advantage
of letting Mr. Frank get away
from his old style. The aston-
ishing influence “The Ameri-
cans” had on other photogra-
phers dismayed him. As the
’60s wore on, more and more
“people would come by or send
me photographs, and they
looked like my photographs.
Then I realized there was no
more point. I wanted to move
on.”
Mr. Frank turned to more
haphazard techniques of pho-
tography: marking up nega-
tives, assembling collages, and
emphasizing spontaneity at the
expense of composition. An ex-
ample of his later style is the al-
bum cover of the Rolling
Stones album “Exile on Main
Street,” for which Mr. Frank
provided the art. Mr. Frank al-so made a documentary film
about the group’s 1972 tour,
“CS Blues,” which the Stones
banned for many years because
of its graphic representations
of backstage drug use and sexu-
al situations.
In 1969, Mr. Frank built a
house in Mabou, Nova Scotia,
and started to divide his time
between there and New York.
Also in that year, he and Mary
Frank divorced.
In 1972, Mr. Frank pub-
lished a photographic autobi-
ography, “The Lines of My
Hand.” An expanded edition
appeared in 1989. A year later,
he donated an archive of some
5,500 negatives, contact
sheets, and prints to the Na-
tional Gallery of Art in Wash-
ington, the first time that insti-
tution had collected the work
of a living photographer. The
gallery organized a major ret-
rospective of Mr. Frank’s work
in 1995. Other museums that
organized exhibitions of Mr.
Frank’s work include New
York’sMuseumofModernArt;the George Eastman Museum,
in Rochester, N.Y.; the Philadel-
phia Museum of Art; New
York’s Whitney Museum of Art;
the Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston.
The many exhibitions de-
voted to Mr. Frank notwith-
standing, the touchstone of his
career remained “The Ameri-
cans.” The National Gallery or-
ganized a major show in obser-
vance of its 50th anniversary,
‘‘Looking In: Robert Frank’s
‘The Americans.’ ’’
“I think that trip was almost
pure intuition — I just kept on
photographing,” he wrote upon
concluding his journey in- “I kept on looking....
That made me work so hard
until I knew I had something,
but I didn’t even know I had
America.”
He leaves his wife, June
Leaf. A son, Pablo, died in - A daughter, Andrea, died
in a plane crash in 1974.
Mark Feeney can be reached at
[email protected].RobertFrank,94,photographerbehindseminalbook‘TheAmericans’
JOHN TLUMACKI/GLOBE STAFF/FILE 1988
Mr. Frank’s book, “The Americans,” includes the images
“Trolley — New Orleans” (above right) and “Charleston,
South Carolina” (below right).By Glenn Rifkin
NEW YORK TIMES
When she was 23, Marca
Bristo, a nurse in Chicago, was
sitting with a friend on the
shore of Lake Michigan. Her
friend’s dog accidentally
knocked a prized pair of Ms.
Bristo’s shoes into the water
and, without a second thought,
she dove in to retrieve them.
Striking her head, she broke
her neck and was paralyzed
from the chest down. In that
instant, Ms. Bristo’s life
changed forever in ways she
could never have anticipated.
She lost her job, her health in-
surance, could no longer use
public transportation, and had
no access to many public plac-
es.
But rather than dwell on
her misfortune, she became a
powerful advocate for people
with disabilities, spending her
life working to change percep-
tions and the rules in a world
that had traditionally ignored
the needs of the disabled. She
was a key player in the passage
of the Americans With Disabil-
ities Act of 1990, which out-
lawed discrimination against
the nearly 50 million Ameri-
cans with disabilities.
After a long battle with can-
cer, Ms. Bristo died Sunday at
66 in her home in Chicago. Her
death was confirmed by her
husband, J. Robert Kettlewell.
Her career as an advocate
for the disabled lasted more
than four decades and influ-
enced several presidential ad-
ministrations. Her success in
reshaping Chicago’s policies
for the disabled formed the ba-
sis for national and interna-
tional legislation as Ms. Bristo,
in her motorized wheelchair,
traveled around the world to
promote her vision for inde-
pendent living.
Her passion reflected her
own life philosophy; she re-
fused to allow her disability to
constrain her. She was married
for 32 years to Kettlewell and
they had two children. She re-
cently became a grandmother.
“She focused on her ability,
not on her disability,” said Val-
erie Jarrett, a senior adviser to
President Barack Obama, who
met Ms. Bristo in Chicago in
the mid-1990s and later made
her an adviser to the Obama
administration. “There wasn’t
a policy decision we made over
those eight years that would af-
fect the lives of people with
disabilities, without consulting
Marca,” Jarrett said in an inter-
view.
In 1980, Ms. Bristo founded
Access Living in Chicago, a
nonprofit that promoted inde-
pendent living for the disabled.
Access Living reshaped Chi-
cago’s landscape for the dis-
abled and became a model for
cities across the country, and
from that, Ms. Bristo founded
the National Council on Inde-
pendent Living, which she led
for many years.
In 1993, President Bill Clin-
ton nominated her to head the
National Council on Disability.
She served in that role until- She was elected presi-
dent of the US International
Council on Disabilities and
traveled around the world to
promote efforts on behalf of
the disabled.
“Marca Bristo’s trailblazing
leadership and bold strategic
vision secured historic prog-
ress for every American with a
disability and their families,”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
said in a statement. “With
Marca’s passing, our nation
has lost an extraordinary
champion for the rights of peo-
ple with disabilities.”
Her signature achievement
was helping to pass the ADA.
She was a protégé of Justin
Dart Jr., vice chair of the Na-
tional Council on Disability,
and someone Ms. Bristo re-
ferred to as the “Martin Luther
King of the disability rights
movement” in a 2015 blog cel-
ebrating the 25th anniversary
of the ADA’s passage. They
worked closely and she made
pointed suggestions for ways
to improve the legislation.
“My husband spotted her to
be a future leader,” Yoshiko
Dart said of Dart, who died in- “She had principle and
passion and wasn’t afraid of
saying things to people. She in-
sisted on justice for all types of
people.”
In the 1980s, as a member
of US Task Force on the Rights
and Empowerment of Ameri-
cans With Disabilities, she con-
nected with then-Congress-
man Tony Coelho of California,
who, along with Senator Low-
ell Weicker of Connecticut, in-
troduced the original ADA bill
to the 100th Congress in 1988.
In her role, Ms. Bristo helped
draft and amend the bill that
eventually made its way to the
president’s desk two years lat-
er.
“She was one of the stron-
gest advocates, from the grass-
roots side,” Coelho said Satur-
day. “To a great extent, without
the grass-roots effort, we
wouldn’t have gotten the ADA.”
Not content with the pas-
sage of the bill, Ms. Bristo
spent the rest of her life mak-
ing sure it was consistently im-
plemented.
Marcia Lynn Bristo was
born June 23, 1953, in Albany,
N.Y., to Earl Clayton Bristo and
Dorothy Madeline Bristo. She
spent her childhood on a fami-
ly farm, along with her older
brother, Paul, and sister, Gail,
in Castleton, New York, before
the family moved to West Win-
field, N.Y.
She spent her senior year of
high school in the Philippines
and went to Beloit College in
Wisconsin in 1971. At fresh-
man orientation, an upper-
classman nicknamed her Mar-
ca and the name stuck. She got
her nursing degree from the
Rush University College of
Nursing in Chicago in 1976, in-tending to be a midwife, and
worked at Northwestern Medi-
cine Prentice Women’s Hospi-
tal in the labor and delivery
unit.
She met Kettlewell in 1986
when he was chief of staff for
the Illinois congresswoman
Cardiss Collins, and the couple
married in 1988. She gave
birth to a son, Samuel, and a
daughter, Madeline. Her
granddaughter was born in Ju-
ly. They, and her sister, Gail
Bristo Smith, survive her.
After her accident, Ms. Bris-
to became acutely aware of the
impediments she would face.
“People immediately treated
me differently because of my
wheelchair,” she wrote in a
2015 Chicago Tribune column.
“In spite of my activist spirit
and the historical civil rights
context in which I was raised, I
was on my own to cope with
this new reality.”
When she later attended a
conference on disability in
Berkeley, Calif., she got a
glimpse of an environment
with a completely different at-
titude toward people with dis-
abilities. The city, with a histo-
ry of activism, had curb cuts,
accessible buildings and bath-
rooms, and the buses had
wheelchair lifts.
“No longer did I see curbs
or stairs or inaccessible buses
and bathrooms as a problem
around which I needed to navi-
gate,” she wrote. “Rather, I saw
them as examples of societal
discrimination — and felt a re-
sponsibility to get involved to
help people with disabilities, in
Illinois and beyond.”
She became part of a grow-ingmovement.“Thisragtagar-
my of people who couldn’t see,
hear, walk, and talk did what
everyone said couldn’t be
done,” she said. “We passed the
most comprehensive civil
rights law since the passage of
the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
Edward M. Kennedy Jr., son
of the late Massachusetts sena-
tor and currently the chairman
of the American Association of
People With Disabilities, met
Ms. Bristo in the mid-1980s
and said “she had an immedi-
ate impact on me.”
Kennedy, a former state
senator in Connecticut, lost a
leg to cancer in 1973, when he
was 12. “She reframed the dis-
ability experience as a civil
rights issue, as opposed to a
medical issue,” Kennedy said
on Saturday. “She was one of
the pioneers trying to change
the way people with disabili-
ties thought about our circum-
stances. She used to talk about
what she called ‘the internal-
ization of oppression’ that ex-
isted in other civil rights strug-
gles.”
“She was a force of nature,”
Kennedy added. “In both her
personal life and political life,
she was a role model for mil-
lions of people with disabilities
in our country.”
Ever the advocate, in the
days before her death, Ms.
Bristo received a phone call
from Pelosi. According to her
husband, the speaker wished
her well and said “I wish there
was something I could do,” to
which Ms. Bristo quickly re-
plied: “You can. Move the Dis-
ability Integration Act to com-
mittee and to a floor vote.”MarcaBristo,66,keyplayerinthepassageoftheAmericansWithDisabilitiesAct
‘WithMarca’spassing,ournationhas
lostanextraordinarychampionforthe
rightsofpeoplewithdisabilities.’
NANCY PELOSI,House speaker