If youāre familiar with the work of photographer Robert Frank, itās probably from seeing it in a book. Frankās The Americans is a staple of photography classrooms everywhere, a tome of vĆ©ritĆ©-style photographs of everyday Americans shot on the Swiss-born photographerās 1955 cross-country tour of the United States.
As an educational tool, itās an essential guide to street photography and a document of a time and place. As a book, itās simply a compelling way to lose a couple of hours without noticing, even if you arenāt an undergrad huffing darkroom fumes. I first encountered The Americans as such an undergrad, in a photography lecture. After Louis Daguerreās rangy Paris street scene, the first known figurative photograph, but before Bernd and Hilla Becherās conceptual images of industrial buildings and Robert Mapplethorpeās āSelf-Portrait with Whip,ā Frank is who you look at, and for good reason: The Americans is like the art worldās answer to Studs Terkelās My American Century. It captures 1950s American life in a way thatās both ambitious and highly specific, and itās one of those rare artistically instructive works that also happens to be accessible and even fun.
Itās something you donāt often get to see outside of the slippery, too-thick pages of a coffee table book. Frankās work is rarely exhibited. Thatās what makes Blue Sky Galleryās new show Robert Frank: Books and Films 1947-2018 so exciting. In this exhaustive exhibition, his images are printed on giant swaths of newsprint hung across several gallery walls, and seeing his work blown up on a large scale is an entirely new way to experience this once-recognizable work. The show is also a completist look at Frankās life and career, bringing together series like The Americans, later film projects, Polaroids, and candid shots of everyone from Frankās family members to the poet Allen Ginsberg, instantly identifiable by his thick glasses and infectious, beneficent grin. Seemingly pedestrian subjectsāaerial shots of neon swimming pools; gently lit, lovingly arranged doughnuts; simple object studies from a very young Frankās job-hunting portfolioāare made beautiful and compelling in the artistās framing and photographic gaze.
I take some issue with the showās lofty claim, in catalog materials, that Frank is āconsidered the inventor of street photography.ā Street photography is an old practice, and staking a claim for a singular āinventorā of the genre seems a dubious project at best. It also ignores the fact that Frank was a contemporary of other great street photographers, including Diane Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and influenced greatly by Walker Evans.
Still, itās undeniable that Frank shot The Americans in a magnificent era for photography, and street photography in particular, and thereās a tactile quality to this show that fans of older photographic methods will enjoy. The combination of newsprint and 35mm is a stark reminder of how profoundly analog photography differs from digital work. Film feels more substantial, heavier, the contrasts sharper, the lighting more exacting, the framing more careful, with small visual pleasures that are necessarily absent from digital pieces, like the legible film grain in Frankās photo of a mountain from his early portfolio work. Thereās a quality to both 35mm and newsprint that draws you in. I wanted to touch the photographs in this show, and I actually pulled a real art school move and crouched down in front of one wall covered in blown-up contact sheetsāprinted rows of Frankās raw negativesābecause I wanted to get as close to the outtakes as I possibly could.
About those contact sheets: Along with Frankās more diaristic projects and Polaroid shots, they give a rare glimpse into his process, making a very humanizing pivot from the expected hagiography. Covering almost an entire wall, Frankās contact sheets are especially delightful to look through slowly: Seeing his red-chalked frames around the images he planned to print delivers an almost voyeuristic, completist thrill, like reading a writerās collected journals when you only know their published work.
One of the first and best pieces of photography advice I have ever heard came from the photography professor who first showed me Frankās work. He recommended that all of his beginning students stick to a short lens and get close to their subjects, cropping while composing their shotsānot afterwards in the darkroom. His students spent months suffering through tiny cuts from loading film in complete darkness, ruining clothes with splashes of wayward fixer, occupying every available enlarger in the darkroom the night before critiques, and printing images in full, even when cropping would have looked better.
Of course, that professor was right: Getting close to your subject is the best way to take a photograph. His class was a relic of an older way of approaching photography, one I doubt is taught much anymore. His initiative against cropping makes more sense when youāre shooting not on an iPhone camera but on a clunky, temperamental lump of metal that needs to be reloaded every 25 shots, when cropping an image the old-fashioned way would mean extra steps in an already-cumbersome printing process. But itās good advice, and it applies as much to the viewer as it does to the photographer. Because when you get close, you get better at shooting, but you get better at looking, too. The best photography shows reward such attention on the part of the viewer. This is one of them.