Media
News
on NYT: Robert Frank, Pivotal Figure in Documentary Photography, Is Dead at 94
adriana teresa letorney
Sep 12, 2019
By Philip Gefter
His death was confirmed by Peter MacGill of Pace-MacGill Gallery in Manhattan.
“The Americans” challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure. Mr. Frank’s photographs — of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life — were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon. The cultural critic Janet Malcolm called him the “Manet of the new photography.”
But recognition was by no means immediate. The pictures were initially considered warped, smudgy, bitter. Popular Photography magazine complained about their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.” Mr. Frank, the magazine said, was “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption.”
READ MORE
Robert Frank, Pivotal Figure in Documentary Photography, Is Dead at 94
Mr. Frank’s visually raw and personally expressive style made him one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century.