Let's Be Frank

Robert Frank is in DC today for a lecture/conversation with with Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. A Conversation with Robert Frank at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 26, 2009 @ 3:30p.m.

In an interview with Art in America in 1996, Robert Frank talked about the photo below from The Americans.

I am still affected by that one photograph of the man on the hill in San Francisco, the way he looked back at me. I think that's why that's my favorite picture in the book. But it was, you know, forty years ago, a long time ago, a different time.


Robert Frank - from The Americans, San Francisco, 1956

The Americans first published in 1958 and 1959, changed the course of 20th-century photography. John Szarkowski, critic, author and curator at MOMA said that Robert Frank established a new iconography for contemporary America. Other books by Robert Frank include, Peru: Photographs and Paris.

The photograph below was one of the last still photographs Frank made before he devoted his creative energy to filmmaking in the early 1960s.

Fourth of July, Coney Island, 1958
Robert Frank (American, born Switzerland, 1924)

The Thing Itself

In the book The Photographer's Eye, first published in 1966, John Szarkowski describes the photograph as "The Thing Itself".

The first thing that the photographer learned was that photography dealt with the actual; he had not only to accept this fact, but to treasure it; unless he did, photography would defeat him.
...
"But he learned also that the factuality of his pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, was a different thing than the reality itself. Much of the reality was filtered out in the static little black and white image, and some of it was exhibited with an unnatural clarity, an exaggerated importance. The subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so. It was the photographer's problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choices in terms of the latter.
This was an artistic problem, not a scientific one..."

Photographs can distort reality. Sometimes we remember the photograph rather than the actual event. Memories are prone to distortion. Last week 60 Minutes reported on the flaws in eyewitness testimony. A woman was shown six photos, and told to pick the perpetrator. After studying the photos for five minutes, she picked an innocent man who was later falsely convicted and jailed. A person's schemas can distort memory. A schema is a mental model of an object or event that includes knowledge as well as beliefs and expectations. Memory is also distored by source amnesia, hindsight bias, the overconfidence effect, confabulation...the list goes on. Photographs can then distort memory.


Lee Friedlander, Untitled, 1962

From the Photographer's Eye