Further Reading
Arnold, Eve. ‘‘Eve Arnold on Martine Franck.’’Aperture
151 (Spring 1998): 4–13.
di Folco, John. ‘‘The Magna Brava Exhibition and Sympo-
sium.’’History of Photography. Vol. 25. Issue 1. (Spring
2001): 110–114.
Loke, Margarett. ‘‘About Man and Nature, Both at War
and at Peace.’’New York TimesVol. 149 Issue 51309,
final ed., sec. Op: E42.ROBERT FRANK
Swiss-American
One of the most-cited figures in twentieth century
photography, Frank’s contribution to the postwar
era lies with his revelatory book,The Americans,
which was not only a seminal work of photography,
but a prickly social document that called into ques-
tion the rosy picture of American life widely
accepted during the Eisenhower years. Although
Frank’s career has spanned more than 50 years, he
has always worked, to some extent, in the long
shadow cast byThe Americans. Frank expressed
his frustration with the legendary status of his
early work thus: ‘‘I wished my photographs (the
old ones) would move—or talk—to be a little
more alive’’; and much of his subsequent work has
been more of this nature: varied, experimental, and
multimedia, embracing film, video, text, poetry,
and performance. A peer of Henri Cartier-Bresson,
who occupies a similar legendary status with photo-
graphs that capture the mood of the street and the
alienation of the individual in society, Frank’s phi-
losophy is in fact diametrically opposed to that of
the French photographer. ‘‘There is no ‘decisive’
moment,’’ Frank has famously said. ‘‘You have to
create it. I have to do everything necessary for it to
appear in my viewfinder’’ (Conversations in Ver-
mont[film] quoted inBild fu ̈r Bild Cinema, Zurich,
1984). The bulk of his work, aside fromThe Amer-
icans, is in fact autobiographical, even confessional
in nature.
Robert Frank was born on November 9, 1924 in
Zurich, Switzerland to Hermann Frank and Rosa
Zucker, a Jewish couple. He attended primary and
secondary schools in Zurich, and upon his gradua-
tion, apprenticed with graphic designer and photo-
grapher Hermann Segesser between 1941 and 1942.
Although Jews were being exterminated all across
Europe, in the safety of neutral Switzerland, the
Franks were able to go about their lives relatively
undisturbed. As a German immigrant, however, in
1941, Hermann Frank, along with his sons Robert
and Manfred, was forced to apply for Swiss citizen-
ship. Robert Frank was finally granted official
Swiss citizenship in 1945. During this unsettled
period, he had continued his study of photography,
working as a still photographer on a film, and at
the film and photography studio of Michael Wol-
gensinger. Wolgensinger had studied with Hans
Finsler, who had trained at the Bauhaus, and he
taught Frank about large format cameras, instilling
by example classical and experimental techniques.
Frank briefly was assistant to a photographer in
Geneva, and he was impressed by the work of the
leading Swiss photographer of the day, Jakob Tug-
gener, who documented the street, architecture,
and social life in Switzerland in a straightforward
and unsentimental way.
After military training in 1945, Frank relocated
to Basel to work at the Hermann Eidenbenz studio,
a graphic design firm, at which time he produced
his first book, a unique volume of original prints
called40 Fotos(street photographs taken with 6
6 Rolleiflex), and he traveled with his family to
Paris and Milan. Frank’s desire, however, was to
leave Switzerland and go to America, which he
achieved in 1947, arriving in New York in Febru-
ary of that year. He found employment as a junior
photographer atHarper’s Bazaarmagazine under
the tutelage of legendary art director Alexey Bro-FRANCK, MARTINE