A Man Entering America With a Camera

Robert Frank at 100: in the last years of his life, it seemed a plausible enough prospect.

- Brian Dillon

So many great, mid-20th-century photographers appear to have been blessed with a more or less productive longevity, not quite explained by active lives spent hefting around camera equipment. For a long time, it was possible to be surprised that some legend of the medium was still going, perhaps still making work, or had died only recently, within what felt like the compass of the contemporary. Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein, Helen Levitt and Irving Penn all lived into their 90s, dying in a new century whose vantage made their best-known images seem like monuments we walk past every day. We might say the same about Frank, who died in 2019, aged 94, six decades after the publication of his most famous work. Except that Frank had long ago killed off the young photographer who made The Americans (1958), and become several different artists instead.

His ultimate subject, forced upon him too early by certain intimate losses – the accidental death of his daughter, the mental illness and suicide of his son – was the shape of a life: its creative lineaments, quotidian horizons, points of retrospect and regret. Yet, there was never anything truly melancholic about Frank’s art, which throughout maintained the lightness of a photograph he took in Paris, aged just 25: a folding chair in the Tuileries Garden (you can tell the location from adjacent shots) that is poised like a dancer en pointe, an homage to Edgar Degas in dilapidated metal and wood (Tree and Chair, Paris, 1949). Delicacy may not be the first thing one associates with the photographer of The Americans and the director of the suppressed Rolling Stones documentary