Frank’s style of self-effacement has been imitated by younger artists – sometimes, as in Nan Goldin’s 1986 photographic book “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” with more shock value than in his originals. But Frank, who at 69 looks like a TV weather-man who lost his job for being a bit too gnarly, is immodestly, well, frank. “I know more and I know better,” he said in his New York studio near the Bowery. “You can do a lot of bad work under the guise of truth. You have to know when to say, ‘Enough’.” The photographer is proven more than right by his retrospective exhibition “Robert Frank: Moving Out,” at Washington’s National Gallery of Art through Dec. 31. (The show travels to Yokohama, Zurich, Amsterdam, New York and Los Angeles.) The first-ever exhibition of a living photographer at the NGA, “Moving Out’s” 159 pictures are a blunt yet stately survey of the man who helped invent “street photography” and then turned it inward.
Born to comfortable parents in Zurich in 1924, Frank was fascinated as a youth with looking at 3-D photographs in a stereopticon. But as a resident alien (because his father was a German Jew), he couldn’t for-really study, or get a job in, photography. (Frank and his brother were granted Swiss citizenship days before the end of World War II, but only after his parents attested that the two were absolutely assimilated, with no traces of Jewishness left.) So he began an unpaid apprenticeship with a local photographer in 1941. Six years later, Frank recalls, he left for America “to get away from the smallness of Switzerland, to get out into the world.” On the basis of a little book of his pictures he brought with him, Frank quickly jot a job with the legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar. Six months later, he resigned to go freelance. And about six months after that, he set off to photograph in Peru and Bolivia. This set a pattern that would see him taking site-intensive pictures in Paris, London, Wales, Spain, all over the United States, Japan and in Nova Scotia (where he lives about half the time, in a seaside town called Mabou).
The big drawback of most photography retrospectives is that they tend to reduce a lifetime of seeing, feeling and shooting to a continuous frieze of little gray rectangles under glass. Or if they don’t do that, they try (as in Richard Avedon’s “Evidence” exhibition earlier this year) to gussy things up with huge prints and overstated contrast, so that nostrils look like craters on a full moon. The challenge in this Frank exhibition, however, is how to tie together photographs like the simple and seemingly miscomposed “Parade–Hoboken, N.J.” (1955) and “Untitled” (1989), in which the photographer has trussed up, Rauschenberg-style, his 1952 picture of a dying corrida bull into an assemblage sculpture. The link, in the NGA’s austere installation, is Frank’s ongoing battle to remain an artist by refusing to submit to artiness. Frank says, “I do something because it’s necessary, not because of how I think it will look … It doesn’t come easy, anyhow. There has to be some kind of upheaval in your mind to make it happen.”
Over the years, Frank has managed to escape war, stultifying Zurich and fashion photography in New York. He has survived both the initial criticism of “The Americans” as depressing and anti-American, and the book’s 35 years as a bible of art photography. He’s fought off the Rolling Stones (who sent a Canadian sheriff to confiscate his documentary of them in 1975), and the mannerisms of his own work. But there have been casualties: divorce from the mother of his two children, his daughter’s death and his son Pablo’s mental illness. Frank knows there’s no getting away clean in life. He drags the debris of flight from work to work, the recollections of one enriching the next. “Photography is a memory box,” Frank says. “It’s an accurate memory box, but sometimes the pictures fade, they disappear.” Or they’re remade in a continually reinvented language. In the end, what Frank has given us is a visual “Finnegans Wake” of his soul.
