The photographer renounced his first career to focus on filmmaking. Starting Wednesday, the Museum of Modern Art will stage a cinema retrospective of his uncompromising search for the real.
In one of art history’s greatest zigzags, Robert Frank, who would have been 100 this year, renounced photography even before he was famous for it.
“I put my Leica in a cupboard,” the Swiss-born artist recalled, soon after his masterpiece, “The Americans,” a photobook documenting a now legendary 10,000-mile cross-country tour, was published in the United States in 1960.
The book’s unpolished depiction of Frank’s adopted country was scandalous to some (the photographer Minor White, in Aperture, called it “a degradation of a nation!”), but almost no photographer has proved more influential: Everyone from Diane Arbus to Dawoud Bey bears Frank’s mark.
Though he would eventually return to still photography in the 1970s, he gravitated toward the narrative possibilities of moving pictures, producing some 30 films and videos.
Frank resented that his films never got as much attention as his photographs. Yet the director Richard Linklater, speaking with the journalist Nicholas Dawidoff in 2015, called Frank the “founding father of personal film”; in 2008, the critic Manohla Dargis hailed Frank in The New York Times as “one of the most important and influential American independent filmmakers of the last half-century.”
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