Response to Robert Frank Show

The Met’s exhibition “Looking in: Robert Frank’s The Americans”, honoring the 50^th anniversary of the publication The Americans, truly captured the importance and timelessness of the art of photography. The social commentary as well as the satire displayed in Frank’s photographs show how forward thinking he was as his images still speak to the contemporary American. Secondly, his work is supported by the abundant didactic information—letters, contact sheets, work prints—that accompany the 83 sequential photographs, all indispensible to the publication.

A Guggenheim Fellowship enabled Robert Frank to create this body of work, that being his quest to "photograph freely throughout the United States" and "make a broad voluminous picture record of things American." He did this driving around the United States, in the mid 1950’s, accompanied only by his trusty Leica.

To read the actual letters exchanged between Walker Evans and Robert Frank discussing his application for the Guggenheim grant was one of the most fascinating parts of the exhibition. Frank’s reasoning for wanting to go on this journey seemed so amateur. If a fellow student would propose something similar, using comparable wording, I feel it would undoubtedly be rejected. It makes you wonder, in retrospect, if there were ever a more worthy project and also what other projects were being considered at the time. I might assume one of the main reasons he was granted the Fellowship was because, with Evans, his friend and mentor, playing a key role in the FSA, it seemed that a recommendation from him secured the fellowship.

Upon examination of many of Frank’s photographs, I found myself thinking of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s coined term: “The Decisive Moment,” which he defined as "The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” Although Frank’s work is more journalistic than Cartier-Bresson’s, I feel that he was able to capture “The Decisive Moment” just as well. Photographs like that of the waitress in the diner with the Santa Claus ornament hung above her head, the iconic trolley image pre Rosa Parks, as well as the African American caretaker holding the porcelain baby, all evoke this notion of capturing a moment. This concept is the gift of photography, the magic that occurs with the click of the shutter. With these photographs, he was making a comment on society, whether: presenting the timely issue of Racial Segregation, the waitress at the local diner – tired and lonely, Consumerism expressed by the bouquet of cheap fake flowers at a cemetery, where sorrow is measured materialistically, or the Environment with his photograph of the gas station in Santa Fe, New Mexico where in it. he satirically comments on the double entendre of the word SAVE. Just like Cartier-Bresson, Frank fell upon these images.

An interesting thing to ponder—something we similarly do when analyzing literature—is are we as viewers creating, through interpretation, meanings for these photographs that didn’t exist when Frank originally took them? I believe our society feels the need to qualify and so maybe it is a little bit of both. Frank probably took some images where upon clicking the shutter he knew he had captured that moment, and fell upon others later when closely examining his contact sheets. Only he would know for certain.