27 Facts About Robert Frank

Robert Frank was a Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker.

Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland, the son of Rosa and Hermann Robert Frank.

Robert Frank turned to photography, in part as a means to escape the confines of his business-oriented family and home, and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before he created his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946.

Robert Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar.

In 1949, the new editor of Camera magazine, Walter Laubli, published a substantial portfolio of Jakob Tuggener pictures made at upper-class entertainments and in factories, alongside the work of the 25 year-old Robert Frank who had just returned to his native Switzerland after two years abroad, with pages including some of his first pictures from New York.

Tuggener, as a serious artist who had left the commercial world behind, was the "one Robert Frank really did love, from among all Swiss photographers," according to Guido Magnaguagno and Fabrik, as a photo book, was a model for Robert Frank's Les Americains published ten years later in Paris by Delpire, in 1958.

Robert Frank soon left to travel in South America and Europe.

Robert Frank created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru, and returned to the US in 1950.

Robert Frank now saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a perspective that became evident in his later photography.

Robert Frank continued to travel, moving his family briefly to Paris.

In 1955, Robert Frank achieved further recognition with the inclusion by Edward Steichen of seven of his photographs in the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man that was to be seen by 9 million visitors and with a popular catalogue that is still in print.

Robert Frank's contributions had been taken in Spain ; of a bowed old woman in Peru; a rheumy-eyed miner in Wales; and the others in England and the US, including two of his wife in pregnancy; and one of six laughing women in the window of the White Tower Hamburger Stand on Fourteenth Street, New York City.

Robert Frank took his family along with him for part of his series of road trips over the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 shots.

Robert Frank later recalled the anti-Semitism to which he was subject in a small Arkansas town.

Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Robert Frank met Beat writer Jack Kerouac "at a New York party where poets and Beatniks were," and showed him the photographs from his travels.

However, according to Joyce Johnson, Kerouac's lover at the time, she met Robert Frank while waiting for Kerouac to emerge from a conference with his editors, at Viking Press, looked at Robert Frank's portfolio, and introduced them to each other.

Robert Frank became lifelong friends with Allen Ginsberg, and was one of the main visual artists to document the Beat subculture, which felt an affinity with Robert Frank's interest in documenting the tensions between the optimism of the 1950s and the realities of class and racial differences.

The irony that Robert Frank found in the gloss of American culture and wealth over this tension gave his photographs a clear contrast to those of most contemporary American photojournalists, as did his use of unusual focus, low lighting and cropping that deviated from accepted photographic techniques.

Over time and through its inspiration of later artists, The Americans became a seminal work in American photography and art history, and is the work with which Robert Frank is most clearly identified.

Robert Frank showed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962.

In 1960, Frank was staying in Pop artist George Segal's basement while filming The Sin of Jesus with a grant from Walter K Gutman.

Robert Frank's photography appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stones' album Exile on Main St.

Robert Frank remarried, to sculptor June Leaf, and in 1971, moved to the community of Mabou in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia in Canada.

Robert Frank acquired a reputation for being a recluse, declining most interviews and public appearances.

Robert Frank continued to accept eclectic assignments such as photographing the 1984 Democratic National Convention, and directing music videos for artists such as New Order, and Patti Smith.

Robert Frank produced both films and still images, and helped organize several retrospectives of his art.

Robert Frank died on September 9,2019, at his home in Nova Scotia.