THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019 N C5
Feiertag, taking their car out of the garage.
Garry Winogrand’s “Park Avenue, New
York, 1959” bears an uncanny resemblance
to it. Of all the great street photographers
who came of age in the ’60s, Winogrand was
most directly influenced by Mr. Frank.
Mr. Frank never succeeded as a Life pho-
tographer. He embedded with a Welsh min-
er’s family to produce a great series of pic-
tures that the magazine never ran. His pho-
tographs were too dark for Henry Luce’s
magazine: black in mood, and, very often,
so subtly graduated in grays and blacks
that they were hard to reproduce. Mr. Frank
chafed like a bridled horse at conforming to
a preordained narrative — as he phrased it,
“those goddamned stories with a beginning
and an end.”
When first published in France in 1958 as
“Les Américains,” Mr. Frank’s pictures
were accompanied by texts by French writ-
ers, often critical of America. That format
placed the images in the subordinate illus-
trational role that he deplored. Reappearing
the next year in the United States as “The
Americans,” the photographs stood on their
own, open-ended.
Mr. Frank carefully sequenced them to
form a visual epic poem, with internal pac-
ing and rhymes. One of the most mordant
juxtapositions was between “Covered Car
— Long Beach, California” (circa 1955-56), a
formal composition that Walker Evans
might have taken, of a big sedan protected
by a shiny sheet beneath two palm trees in
crepuscular light, and “Car accident — U.S.
66, between Winslow and Flagstaff, Ari-
zona” (1955), a grainy shot that could have
been cut from a newspaper, of four people
standing by a body covered with a tarp as a
powdery snow falls.
Mr. Frank’s discovery of America was
partly a journey of disillusionment. “Fourth
of July — Jay, New York” (1954) is one of thepictures that led his critics to criticize “The
Americans” as anti-American. The thread-
bare flag and littered lawn don’t measure up
to the story Americans told about them-
selves and their heritage. Most critics de-
spised the book when it came out.
Cutting deeper still is “Trolley — New Or-
leans” (1955). Using the ready-made parti-
tions of the window supports, Mr. Frank dis-
played the racial divisions that plagued his
adopted country. The haughty face of the
white woman and the privileged look of the
two children contrast poignantly with the
weary expression of the African-American
man consigned to the back of the streetcar.
Adding to the formal élan of this great pho-
tograph, the reflections on the upper win-
dows provide a framed series of abstract
beauty.
Less than a decade after publication of
“The Americans,” the Museum of Modern
Art presented “New Documents,” a three-
artist survey, now renowned, in which the
director of photography, John Szarkowski,
focused on three artists who used the docu-
mentary form “to explore their own experi-
ence and their own life and not to persuade
somebody else what to do or what to work
for,” as he told me in a 2003 interview.
Along with Winogrand, he included Di-
ane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. By that
time, Mr. Frank was established as a mas-
ter. All of his successors were advancing a
boundary line that he had established in
“The Americans.” In one obvious instance,
the series of pictures that Friedlander took
in the early ’60s of image-bearing television
sets in a room had been presaged by Mr.
Frank’s photograph “Restaurant — U.S. 1
leaving Columbia, South Carolina” (1955).
But by the time of “New Documents,” Mr.
Frank was essentially finished with straight
photography. Although he took occasional
magazine reporting assignments, he de-
voted much of the rest of his long profes-
sional life to making movies and to crafting
photo composites and text-and-image
pieces. He was a restless, impossible-to-sat-
isfy man. He left to others the task of culti-
vating the field he had plowed.AN APPRECIATION ARTHUR LUBOW
Capturing Epic Poems of America in Photographs
Robert Frank’s “Mr. and Mrs. Feiertag, Late Afternoon” (1951), from the photo essay “People You Don’t See,” about Mr. Frank’s neighbors on a Manhattan street.ROBERT FRANK; NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTONCONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Mr. Frank’s “Restaurant — U.S. 1 Leaving Columbia, South Carolina” (1955). Soon after, other photographers began including TV sets in their shots.
“Tulip/Paris,” from the series “Black White and Things” (1950).“Couple/Paris” (1952). Mr. Frank had the ability to capture moments of emotion.Mr. Frank in 1973, visiting the beach along Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. “Wales, Ben James,” from 1953, when Mr. Frank lived with a Welsh miner’s family.
ROBERT FRANK; VIA PACE/MacGILL AND THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ARTROBERT FRANK; VIA PACE/MacGILL AND THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ARTROBERT FRANK FROM “THE AMERICANS,” VIA PACE/MacGILL AND THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ARTDANNY SEYMOUR ROBERT FRANK, VIA PACE/MacGILL GALLERY, NEW YORKcaped from his prison. New York would re-
main his home, at least for part of the year,
for the rest of his life. He died on Monday at
94.
Rigorously unsentimental in his attitude
to the world around him, Mr. Frank deviat-
ed from form in 1950, taking what was argu-
ably his most romantic picture. He had his
reasons. He was in love. The year before he
had met the artist Mary Lockspeiser, who
became his first wife. In “Tulip/Paris,” he
photographed a young man who is holding
behind his back a tulip — presumably in-
tended for the woman standing in the back-
ground. An old man, at the other end of life’s
arc, approaches the viewer. It is a classic ro-
mantic Paris street photograph. The knowl-
edge that Mr. Frank had gotten a friend to
pose (much as Bill Brandt did in his “can-
did” photographs a decade before) does
nothing to diminish its charm.
A later picture made in the same city,
“Couple/Paris” (1952), is also lovestruck.
That nighttime shot epitomizes the ability
of an artist with a fast camera to capture the
fleeting nature of emotion — in this case,
pure exhilaration. The woman grins glee-
fully. The sharpness of the steering wheel
and chassis contrast with the blur of the
man’s ecstatic face and the highlights on the
surrounding darkness, heightening the
dizzy-making sensation.
Before he landed on “The Americans” as
a means of presenting his photographs, Mr.
Frank tried unsuccessfully to make a living
by packaging them to suit the demands of
magazines, particularly Life. One of his
projects, a photo essay called “People You
Don’t See,” chronicled the daily lives of his
neighbors on East 11th Street. He entered it
in a Life contest for young photographers.
He won second prize, which carried the sub-
stantial stipend of $1,250. The best picture
in the essay portrayed a Mr. and Mrs.