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Robert Frank was born in 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland; his parents were Jewish. He was part of a European generation most of whom fought in the Second World War, but Switzerland remained neutral, while across the border Jews were being killed by the million. The German-speaking area of Switzerland was dominated by Nazis and Frank grew up with a constant knowledge of the possibility of persecution, but in Switzerland, freedom of speech and the freedom to create remained. There was even something of a flowering of German culture in Switzerland during the war years.

Frank apparently learnt photography from a photographer who lived in the same block

of flats as his family, Hermann Segesser. In 1942, at the age of 18, he was apprenticed

to Hermann Eidenbenz(1902 -?) and later worked for Michael Wolgensinger in Zurich.

Wolgensinger (1913-90) had learnt photography from Johannes Meiner in Zurich before

attending Bauhaus-trained Hans Finsler's classes at the Zurich School of Commercial Art.

Finsler was a leading Swiss photographer and teacher, and Wolgensimmer became his assistant from 1935-7. Wolgensimmer taught Frank to use large format cameras and controlled lighting in the studio. Following this, Frank worked for a short time for a film company in Zurich, Gloria Films. Wolgensinger also later worked with experimental and commercial film - including 'Metamorphose ' - as well as colour installations.

The young Frank was impressed by Paul Senn's pictures of Spanish refugees, as well as by

the resolutely Swiss pictures of Jakob Tuggener (see the About feature on Swiss Photography - link in box at top right.) Although Tuggener was right wing and conservative in his views,

the 'beatnik' and bohemian Frank admired both his work and his artistic intransigence.

He compares Tuggener to the famous Swiss national hero, William Tell - Tuggener's work

was Switzerland seen totally without sentimentality. Frank was also impressed by the way

he used his photographs in sequences - particularly in his book of photographs of factories,

'Fabrik', using montage techniques borrowed from the world of film.

Montage should not be confused with 'photomontage'. Montage was a term and technique developed particularly by the great early Russian film directors, Eisenstein - in 'Strike',

'The General Line' and 'The Battleship Potemkin' and Pudovkin in 'The End of St Petersburg'

and elsewhere. Pudovkin tried to analyse its use in his book 'Film Technique' where he states

that montage is the foundation of film art. He sets out five techniques of montage:

contrast - where for example the plight of a starving man is heightened by following it with

a scene of a feast;

parallelism - which extends contrast by inter-cutting the scenes;

similarity - which makes use of similar content - as when Eisenstein cuts from strikers being

shot to an ox being slaughtered in an abattoir in the finale of 'Strike';

synchronism - which involves cutting between events happening at the same time - will the hero rescue the helpless female from the track before she is hit by the fast-approaching

locomotive; and recurrent theme (Leitmotiv) - a recurring image or scene. Although this schema was extended greatly by Timoshenko and usefully extended and clarified by Rudolf Arnheim in his 'Film as Art' (1966) - still a useful resource for both the study of film and for photographers - it has the merit of simplicity.

Tuggener was not of course the first to sequence photographs with some care. One of the strengths of the great editors of the illustrated magazines of the 1920s and 30s such as Stefan Lorant was their skill in photographic layout. However in general this was largely a matter of linking photographs to a narrative line, often corresponding to a temporal sequence. Lorant also often worked with pairs of pictures as a contrast, often humorous, seen at its most obvious in the magazine 'Liliput'. Bill Brandt, the great British photographer of the 1930s-50s, was also adept at sequencing, for example in his book 'A Night in London'(1938), where a largely temporal structure is used.

Tuggener's approach in 'Fabrik' and other projects was more radical in its use of montage,

making use in particular of contrast, similarity and leitmotiv. It represented a decisive move

away from viewing the single photograph as 'the photographic work' to seeing it in terms of the whole series of pictures.

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By 1946, Frank was prowling the streets of Zurich with a 35mm rangefinder camera, developing his own style. He was learning to use the camera in a fluid and intuitive manner, trying to capture his impressions spontaneously rather than to calculate and impose a composition on them.

As soon as possible, in 1947, Frank left Switzerland and moved to New York. Art director Alexey Brodovitch encouraged Frank to photograph for Harper's Bazaar and other fashion magazines. Frank soon found fashion restricting and he also began to contribute to magazines and newspapers, including 'Life', 'Look', Fortune, McCall's, and The New York Times. He started to travel, photographing in South America for a book including work by by Swiss photographer Werner Bischof(see the Directory of Photographers - box at right) and French photographer Pierre Verger, who devoted more than half of his life to the study, promotion, and practice of Afro-Brazilian culture. In 1951 Frank came back to Europe, and photographed in mining villages in Wales as well as in London and Paris, producing some memorable work.

In Wales, Frank took powerful if slightly predictable views of coal miners. One stands out, a close view of a miner coming back from the pit, blackened by coal. The cheery face beneath a cloth cap is heightened by contrast with the broader out of focus miner in the left of the frame. His picture of children playing on the slag heap, and of a miner at home scrubbing himself in a zinc bath while his wife sits at the table reading the newspaper are vibrant reminders of now long vanished times, and were surely informed by pictures from the some fifteen years earlier of similar scenes by Bill Brandt. In 1958, Frank himself wrote: 'The work of two contemporary photographers, Bill Brandt of England and the American, Walker Evans, have influenced me.'

Perhaps his most curious and powerful vision from Wales derives its graphic treatment of the topography most obviously from Brandt. The frame is divided vertically almost exactly centrally, its left side consisting of the blank, windowless end of a house and below it, its darker reflection in the wet street between it and the photographer.

The house is on a street corner, but the photographer's position is chosen so we see only the empty side of the house, and nothing of its front or back. Past it the other side of the street runs down a hill, a wide angle lens giving its close terraced row a steep perspective, wet wet roof slates glistening.

In the distance in the centre of the picture we can muted through rain further roofs and a distant mountain merge into a featureless sky. The road surface at the right of the picture is broken and pitted, almost like a pond into which someone has thrown a stone, perhaps by subsidence - common in mining areas. So far it could be pure Brandt, but Frank provides us with a more human touch, which also adds a sense of mystery and surreal humour. A row of people stands awkwardly along the base of the wall; four men, then another man and his daughter stand facing the photographer, and someone, perhaps his son, squats at the end of the wall nearest the street corner. Carrying along this line out into the centre of the road we see a dog carefully crossing, oblivious of the rain.

In London too he was drawn to the stereotype, but rendered it in a personal and interesting fashion; men in bowlers and top hats stroll through the fog of city streets, carrying umbrellas. Magritte could well have used some of these as source material. There are also some odd moments and places - a dog in a foggy street, another levitating in a yard, an angel peering over a wall, mothers (or nannies) struggling with giant wrapped babies and prams in parks, bomb sites ...

On a dull rainy day Frank stood beside a black hearse on the pavement of a street of terraced houses, whose doors opened straight onto the pavement. The rear door of the hearse is open wide, its square window producing a frame onto the opposite side of the street, through which we see a street sweeper with a hand-cart. At the end of the empty street a person and a lorry emerge vaguely from the rain, while along the glistening pavement at the left of the picture a young girl and her reflection are caught running. It is a strange and moving picture; clearly

we can see it is about life and death, but to say that is only a starting point.

In Paris he photographed a group of four kids perhaps tormenting a tethered hose in a waste land on the edge of town; in the distance through the slight mist we see the tall apartment blocks, probably of some vast public housing scheme. On the right of the frame the horse, wearing a coat against the cold, stands unmoving, facing mutely a small boy who holds his hands up, palms towards him in some kind of challenge, perhaps 10 feet away, while his friends behind him scurry away.

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3 New York

Back in New York in 1953, Frank began to work with Edward Steichen in selecting work for an exhibition on 'Post-War European Photographers' at the Museum of Modern Art, and later for 'The Family of Man'. Frank took Steichen to visit the studio of Jacob Tuggener among other photographers, and two of Tuggener's pictures were included in the exhibition.

'The Family of Man'(1955) was an important experience for Frank; as he has made clear, he did not share the 'Captain's' (Steichen) sentimental vision behind this, and left the team well before the show came on. Steichen ordered the vast show - 503 black and white photographs taken by photographers from 68 countries - around a number of themes - 'creation, birth, love, work, death. justice, the search for knowledge, relationships, democracy, peace and opposition to brutality and slaughter', as Dorothy Norman listed them, although in practice the show revolved more around some - birth, death, work, knowledge, play - more than others.

The show was generally well received at the time - and a great popular success around the world (it is now on permanent exhibition at the Chateau de Clervaux in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, though currently not much of it is available on-line). From the start it was also subjected to a great deal of criticism both by photographers and intellectuals. One of the first truly radical criticisms came from the seminal French thinker Roland Barthes. At the time it was showing in Paris he wrote an essay (reprinted in his 'Mythologies',(1957)) deploring the way the show removed the events depicted from their historical conditions, thus draining them of real meaning: 'Whether or not the child is born with ease or difficulty, whether of not his birth causes suffering to his mother, whether or not he is threatened by a high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a type of future is open to him: this is what your Exhibitions should be telling people, instead of an eternal lyricism of birth.'

Other, more obvious if shallower, criticisms concerned the actual selection of the work. Many outstanding photographers - among them the four most important American photographers of the first half of the nineteenth century - were either completely ignored - Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans (he apparently declined to take part when Steichen would not agree that his work would not be cropped of reprinted), or, in the case of Edward Weston, represented by a single and unrepresentative work. Steichen had decided that only certain types of photography would be included in his view of the family, excluding that whole area of the snapshot and a growing body of photography based on it, the very area of photography most intimately and inextricably bound to the exhibition's theme of the family. Steichen's view was

to be an outsider's view, centred around the work of photojournalists, those global tourists who had established themselves in the 1920s and 1930s, to the neglect of other insights. Also present were a few notable exceptions from 'fine art' photography, to match the tone of some of the more high-flown and abstract quotations.

Of course there is plenty of great photography in 'The Family of Man' (as well as some rather routine work) and its faults were more in the hubris of its intentions - it announced itself as 'the greatest photographic exhibition of all time' - and the sheer mawkishness of some of the accompanying text - again largely out of context snippets from the Bible and other great works.

Among the 273 photographers with work in the show, the largest representation came from Wayne Miller, Steichen's assistant. Over 50 were from Magnum members, giving that Agency a welcome boost. There were seven pictures by Robert Frank, putting him on a par with Henri Cartier-Bresson and Dorothea Lange. Frank also appeared in the exhibition in

a portrait taken by Louis Faurer - the only photographer to be present in this way (it was a show that avoided much evidence of cultural achievement, probably as being elitist.) However, as Eric Sandeen wrote in his book Picturing an Exhibition on the show, Steichen in his exhibition 'seems to be on the other side of a cultural divide' to Robert Frank. The evidence for this is in the book 'The Americans' and not only in the work it contains, but also in the references implied in it to the 'Family of Man'.

Meanwhile, Frank had discovered another of the elements that was to influence him greatly, Walker Evan's seminal book 'American Photographs'. Again this was a carefully and subtly sequenced work, with picture linking visually to picture and recurring themes. Evans possibly drew his ideas about sequencing more from literary than film sources (see the references at end for more on Evans.) Frank took his work to show Evans, who was impressed; it was Evans who was the major support behind Frank when he successfully applied for a Guggenheim Grant to make a journey across America taking photographs. Frank was the first European photographer to get such a grant.

A further influence on Frank was also largely literary (although at that time derided by the literary establishment.) This was the 'beat generation' - writers and poets such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Kerouac had written 'On the Road', his second book, using a single long roll of paper in his typewriter so he could let his stream of thought flow out through its keys to paper without interruption, without pausing to think or any editing. The book is based around a series of four largely pointless journeys by Kerouac (Sal Paradise), driving across America with or to visit his friend 'Dean Moriaty', whose wild behaviour and unreliability were legendary.

Written in 1950, Kerouac's publisher turned it down, and it did not appear until 1957. Frank was almost certainly not familiar with it when he made his own journeys around America, although he had met Ginsberg in the early fifties. However Frank's attitudes and view of America has considerable similarities to that of the beats, so much so that when he met Kerouac, Frank asked him to write an introduction to his book.

The road, had however been a subject in some of his early photographs; soon after arriving in New York (1948), he had pointed his Leica down in the middle of a wide street; seven eights of the picture, taken in dull conditions, is grey road, its white centre line stretching also vertical and straight apparently to infinity. The roadway is empty except for a lone pedestrian walking across in the distance and, at the next intersection, a few tiny cars presumably waiting for the lights to change. In the small top eighth or so we see the streams of people on the

pavement and the facades rising from the street, in their middle a small gap of sky at the end of the road.

Again in 1948, on his trip to Peru, he took another, quite different road, apparently from the back of a cart or lorry. This road runs straight through empty low scrub slight hills in the distance, above them large banks of unbroken cloud. The road is in sunlight, one small rider on horseback casting a shadow across it. In the foreground are the mass of Frank's fellow travellers, crowded backs and hats, the scene dominated by a central tall white hat the camera looks down on.

Up until the 1950s, the image of the photographer - at least in the area of photojournalism away from hard news - had been that of an observer, almost a fly on the wall, or perhaps a flaneur, a stroller along the boulevards of life, catching upon moments and stealing them. Henri Cartier-Bresson entitled his great monograph Images a la Sauvette,(1952) which might perhaps be translated as 'Images on the Sly', with the suggestion that these 'candid' shots were moments stolen rapidly from life by the photographer, although we know it better by the title it was given by its American publisher, 'The Decisive Moment'.

Frank is one of a number of photographers in this time who was shifting the balance away from the photographer as observer towards a recognition that the photographer was an actor in the event he or she was photographing. With photographers such as William Klein, this often took the form of an active interaction with his subjects in which the photographer recorded their reaction to him. Frank's approach was more cerebral and more introspective, photographing his reactions and views as much as anything external. It was a shift from third to first person, from 'this was the scene' to 'this is how I saw and felt the scene.'

Of course such a more subjective mode was not new in photography. All photographs are more than just visual records. Stieglitz through his study of Georgia O'Keefe, not to mention his 'Equivalents' and scenes around Lake George, and others such as Minor White had shifted the ground past recording nature or creating beauty firmly onto the terrain of feelings, as indeed in a more understated way had Walker Evans (so understated that few had noticed.)

But Frank was doing it as a photojournalist, working with a Leica, creating pictures that could often be dismissed as 'mere snapshots', and often technically deficient - unsharp, blurred, grainy - at that.

The next feature in this series of two on Frank will analyse his major work 'The Americans' and look at his later career in film and photography.

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WEB LINKS

ROBERT FRANK

Most of the web links concentrate on Frank's work for the Americans.

Robert Frank: The Americans

Six of the pictures from this complete showing of the work from 'The Americans' at the Museum of Photographic Arts,

San Diego, with text.

Fotomuseum Winterthur

Very slow to load as page has images by a number of photographers - including 8 by Frank.

Dissecting the American Image

Great article by Jno Cook originally published in Exposure quarterly, Spring 1986. Still probably the best on

understanding 'The Americans', though.

Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art

Good Article on Frank with one photograph

Frank, Robert (1924- )

Route 66: Cruising the American Dream - a good illustrated presentation with voice commentaries.

Robert Frank

Text with six pictures from The Americans from Bassett and Steenbock Galleries show.

Robert Frank - Seattle Arts Museum

Click on 'continue' to see more text - there are about 7 sections but the page doesn't always display them all.

Worth reading - even if you may have to view the source code to do so!

Robert Frank - The Americans

6 pictures and short text

Robert Frank en cabane

If you can read French, this is the story of Frank being arrested and held in jail for 3 days in Little Rock during

his Guggenheim trip, including three letters originally written in English.

Robert Frank - Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

A picture from London and his well known 'Trolley, New Orleans, 1955'.

The Aesthetic Triptych of Robert Frank

Lecture text with illustrations.