About two weeks ago I took a notion to write an article reviewing
some photo-related books that I felt were, for one reason or another,
of particular interest. Actually, the notion occured to me some time
ago and I finally acted on it. I found the whole process of writing
it to be even more enjoyable than I'd expected; and I can already
tell that it's helped my photography.
Following is an excerpt from that article. The excerpt deals with
Robert Frank's book Black White and Things. I've read much of
the critical literature on Frank's work . . . and found it mostly
wanting. To my knowledge no one has discussed this book in quite
such detail, nor approached Frank's work as a whole in quite the way
I feel it warrants. So this is my attempt to rectify that - a
beginning, anyway. I post it here because, of course, Frank was (is)
a Leica photographer. And because I am eager to get the discussion
going.
The article this is excerpted from is called Berek's Dog,
Seeing Rightly, and a Bottle of Scotch. The other books
discussed in the article are: Darkroom (published by Ralph
Gibson's Lustrum Press); Open City: Street Photography
Since 1950 (National Gallery of Art / Scalo); and
A History of The Photographic Lens by Rudolf Kingslake.
I suppose I could shop it around to various journals; but I prefer to
see it put up here on Photo.net. Since the article is too long,
really, to be appropriate in a forum, I sent it a few days back to
Brian Mottorshead for consideration. Brian, however, is as you might
imagine a super busy guy, what with keeping this site up and all
that; so I expect he could use some encouragement. If you'd like to
read the balance of this article, elsewhere on this site, drop Brian
a note.
Meanwhile, here is the excerpt. I look forward to your comments.
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Every
once in
awhile I dive into the deep, deep black pool of Robert
Frank. And, whenever I do, I always emerge
it seems
with more – and less – than I had on entry.
His Aperture
monograph, Robert Frank, is a good place
to get
wet; but, the monograph being something of a hodgepodge – lacking
cohesiveness
and direction – Black White and
Things
is a far better place. Better
because of
its larger format and superior printing; better also because the
images
together form a single work.
Black
White and Things began, the publisher tells us, in 1952 as a
spiral-bound
volume put together by Frank himself, in three copies - each
containing
identical original prints.
Frank gave
one copy to Edward Steichen, one to his
parents, and
kept the third for himself (until 1990, when he donated it to the
National
Gallery of Art in
Washington).
For me perhaps the most
interesting
thing about this work is how utterly independent it seems of the era
in which
it was made. The photographs,
fifty
years after the fact, have lost none of their freshness and knife’s
edge vitality. Today, when, as Henri Cartier-
Bresson
recently said, “every Tom, Dick, and Harry is a photographer,” Frank
shows in
this book not how it is
done,
exactly, but that it can be.
In his work – this book in
particular – Frank does what I’ve always had in mind for myself: make
a group
of images that are so definitive, there is no pressing need to make
more; then,
move on to something else (filmmaking in his case).
Many
of these images, with their impressionistic, mysterious mists and
pointillist-like grain, evoke for me nothing so much as the work of
Clarenc
e H.
White; as well as, to a lesser degree, that of Alfred Stieglitz
and Edward Steichen – Photo-Secessionists
all; with
the difference being in part that Frank’s work is wholly honest and,
in its own
way, straightforward: stripped of all the Victorian romanticism and
pretensions
to retrograde art that characterized much of the earlier pictorialism
(especially the Photo-Secession; White was likely least guilty of
this). Not for nothing then that Frank
gave a copy
to Steichen.
(Some of Frank’s images bring to mind famous paintings, as
well – in
particular, the flâneur view of Gustave
Caillebotte’s “Paris Street;
Rainy Day”, and the high
stylization of Seurat’s “A
Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1984” – but without the bourgeois
stuffing!) (I use
the term “bourgeois”, as Vladimir Nabokov
once said,
in the Flaubertian sense, not the Marxian
one.)
The absence of romanticism
and
pretense here isn’t the only thing that separates this work from the
Pictorial
photography of old. The photos
of Black White and Things, like
all of
Frank’s work, were shot on the fly and are often characterized by odd
angles
and unusual perspectives; yet in none of them is this gratuitous –
or, if
gratuitous, not without impact.
This is
impulse shooting, but impulse shooting controlled – keyed-in, with
exquisite
sensitivity, to forms, movement, gesture, shadow, light; and to how
all of
these together make a palette of manifold possibilities for
character, in the
landscape of the perceiving, performing eye.
The character conveyed is throughout the book changing –
sometimes
haunting and heavy (a woman, somewhat wild-eyed, looking up from
shrouds of
shadow, the faint trace of a smile on her face); sometimes light but
still
haunting (the silhouette of a man, in bowler and topcoat, walking
alone among
mists and trees in mild shades of grey) – and the resulting feeling
is one of
movement and dynamism. This
varying,
continuous tempo is key to the work as a
whole and
prefigures Frank’s move into cinema.
Of interest then, as
mentioned
earlier, is picture selection – necessarily the final key in
photography, for
it gives a body of work, whether one shot or many, its shape,
texture, and
posture in relation to the planet.
Black White and Things was put
together
just before the period of The
Americans
and covers much (perhaps all) of the geography Frank had shot in:
there are
images from throughout Europe,
South America,
and the U.S.
(some of which were later to appear in the latter book). In this context it is made clear,
if it wasn’t before, that the pictures comprising The Americans were not
intended as a
criticism of the U.S. in particular; and that in fact picking out a single
country for
concerted criticism was quite beyond Frank, or quite beneath
him. Rather, in his work Frank was
(inadvertently
perhaps) doing the New World the favor of
integrating it
into the old one; of merging them together into a world of multiple
facets and
attributes; but with only one name, his own.
(Which is the most any of us can ever do.)
This is not the nihilism (“Nothing is true, everything is
permitted”) Frank
has often been accused of (wrongly, in my view). Rather, what is implied in his work
is simply
this: If you are true, the
world is
likewise. That is what’s
permitted.
With this in mind I ask
myself, what
is the essential thing that makes the work of Black White and Things so compelling? Even to ask the question requires
looking,
looking, and looking again.
And I find
the answer here, in an epigram to the book: a quote from Saint-Exupery.
It reads,
It
is only with the heart that one can see rightly
What
is essential is invisible to the eye
By refusing to serve
social issues
or observe national boundaries – and by managing to see with the
heart (in this
he remains arguably the most internationalist of
photographers) – Frank, rather than leveling the world, elevates the
psyche to
the level of (greater) self-awareness and recognition of itself in
others
everywhere. And that, after
all, is the
job of art.
, Apr 19, 2003; 07:15 a.m.
