an urban setting (Rodeo—New York City), the per-
sonal in the book’s final image of Frank’s own car,
within it his sleeping wife and child (U.S. 90, en
route to Del Rio, Texas). Yet the individual images
hold up as works of art: among the best known are
of a Black nurse holding a baby so preternaturally
White it seems to glow (Charleston, South Carolina)
and a tuba player at a political rally, his face com-
pletely blocked by the giant circle of the tuba’s horn
(Political Rally—Chicago).
Although the process of shooting for the classic
images that make upThe Americanswas a solitary,
peripatetic activity, Frank’s more common process
is one of collaboration. His well-known 16mm film,
Pull My Daisy(1959) was realized with New York
painter Alfred Leslie and is a free interpretation of
an act from Jack Kerouac’s playThe Beat Genera-
tion.Frank went on to make more than 20 films,
includingMe and My Brother(1965–1968),Cock-
sucker Blues (1972), featuring Mick Jagger and
Keith Richard of the rock group The Rolling
Stones, andThis Song for Jack(1985), featuring
Beat poets and writers Gregory Caruso, Allen
Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and dedi-
cated to Jack Kerouac. Frank also produced the
music videos Run for New Order (1989) andSum-
mer Cannibalsfor Patti Smith (1996).
His works subsequent to The American, are
filled with family, friends, and places that reflect
the fabric of his life. In the 1960s, he concentrated
primarily on making films, although he was begin-
ning to have some success with his photographs:
his first solo museum exhibition was held in 1961
at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the George
Eastman House purchased 25 images fromThe
Americansin 1965. Photographs that made up his
next publication,The Lines of My Hand, began to
be amassed. Published in 1972, this book looks
inward, at Frank’s own life and what it means to
be an artist.
In 1970, Frank, his marriage to Mary over, had
become involved with artist June Leaf, and together
they purchased property in the desolate, often
extreme climate of Mabou, Nova Scotia, where
they built a studio and resided part of the year,
and which was to be the setting for and subject of
many photographs. The 1970s were full of personal
difficulties for the photographer; his daughter
Andrea, only 20, died in an airplane crash in Gua-
temala in 1974. His close friend and frequent colla-
borator on films, Daniel Seymour, disappeared and
was presumed dead. His father died in 1976. His
son, Pablo, who would eventually commit suicide,
was becoming increasingly troubled by mental il-
lness, and Frank unflinchingly confronted these
tragedies with his camera, often in montaged
sequences of snapshot-like images that are difficult
to read in that they are fractured, shot at extreme
angles, and inscribed with texts, some written into
the film’s emulsion. Rather than the fluid narrative
line achieved byThe Americans, the works ofThe
Lines of My Handare disjointed and resist easy
interpretation. Many are clearly expressions of
grief and are often painful to become involved in,
such asMonument for my Daughter Andrea, April
21, 1954/December 28, 1974, which consists of
Polaroids presented on a photo album page, or
Sick of Goodby’s, 1978.
In 1990, on the occasion of a major retrospective
mounted by the National Gallery of Art, America’s
most prestigious museum, the Robert Frank Col-
lection was founded. Consisting of negatives, con-
tact sheets, work, and exhibition prints, it is a
fitting tribute for the Swiss-born artist who helped
reveal America to itself. Yet Frank’s work can be
best summed up by the work Hold Still—Keep
Movingof 1989, used as the title for his 2000 retro-
spective at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Ger-
many. A photograph is seized from a flow of life; it
holds life still, yet all the photographer, or the
viewer, for that matter, can do is to keep moving.
LynneWarrenSeealso:Evans, Walker; Fauer, Louis; History of
Photography: Twentieth-Century Pioneers; Museum
of Modern Art; Street PhotographyBiography
Born Zurich, Switzerland, 9 November 1924. Apprenticed
to and worked for various photographers and photo
studios, including Hermann Segesser and Michael Wol-
gensinger Studio, Zurich, and Victor Bouverat, Geneva,
1941–1945. Employed by Hermann Eidenbenz graphic
design studio, Basel, 1946. Began extensive period of
traveling and photographing with trip to Paris and
Milan, 1946. Moved to New York, February 1947,
employed as a junior photographer,Harper’s Bazaar
magazine. Freelance photographer, 1947–1958. Traveled
to South America, 1948. Married to Mary Lockspieser,- Co-founder, group ‘‘New American Cinema,’’
with Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Peter Bogdanovich,
and others, 1960. Involvement with artist June Leaf
(marriage 1975) and purchase of residence in Mabou,
Nova Scotia, Canada, 1970. Death of daughter Andrea
in plane crash, 1974. Death of son, Pablo, 1994. Taught
in filmmaking: Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester,
New York, 1971; Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design, Halifax, 1972; University of California, Davis, - Extensive travels in 1990s, including Italy, Spain,
Egypt, Russia, and Japan. Awards include: Erich Sala-
mon Award of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fu ̈r Photogra-
phie, Berlin, 1985; Peer Award for Distinguished Career
in Photography, Friends of Photography, San Francisco,
FRANK, ROBERT