Robert Frank- Depth of Field
About:
Born: Nov. 9, 1924 in Zürich, SwitzerlandIn 1956, he was still a relative newcomer to the United StatesHe has produced other volumes over the years and made 31 films and videos.
By 1954 his reputation was such that he was awarded the first non American Guggenheim fellowship.His masterpiece: ''The Americans,'' an intimate visual chronicle of common people in ordinary situations drawn from several trips he made through his adopted country in the mid-1950s. To create his collection of images for “The Americans” he shot 767 rolls of film yielding about 27,000 images. He edited that down to about 1,000 work prints, spread them across the floor of his studio and tacked them to the walls for a final edit. Out of a year and a half of work, Frank chose just 83 images. When Grove Press first published ''The Americans'' in 1959, a chorus of critical disdain rose from the few who bothered to write about photography at the time.
Popular Photography magazine derided Mr. Frank's black-and-white pictures of isolated individuals, teenage couples and groups at funerals for their ''meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.
Today Mr. Frank is viewed as a pioneer of the snapshot aesthetic, a term coined in the late 1960s to denote the spontaneous style and modest subject matter that came to dominate black-and-white photography of that period When Mr. Frank arrived in New York from Zurich, he had been an apprentice for several design and photography studios and was well tutored in the visual ideas that defined Modernism in Europe between the world wars.
Technique/Subject Matter:
Robert Franks work is created to give the viewer a new way of seeing the world with the use of grainy, dramatic, blurred and tilted shots.
Frank rarely spoke to his subjects; he chose to point, shoot and move along. He investigated the gaudy insanities and strangely touching contradictions of American culture. Robert shot subject matter everyone was familiar with, but no one had accepted without condescension these facts as the basis for a coherent iconography for our time.
The ordinary, incidental moments captured in his pictures -- and their raw, informal look -- paved the way for photographers like Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand a decade later. His style was summed up by the beat author Jack Kerouac who said in his introduction to The Americans in 1959 "Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand, he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world".
Why I was Influenced:
I enjoy Robert's controversial work such as the girl smoking a cigarette. This questions what society thinks is right or wrong, and what society thinks is art or not. I was also influenced by his work of words written on mirrors. I played with mirrors a lot in my last project with Pinholes, so I was intrigued by his mirror photographs. I also liked the idea of writing on the mirror because it would make the photograph more personal and have a clearer focus.
He shot normal everyday life. I used this concept in my work by shooting myself in a bathroom because it is an everyday place everyone goes. I wrote on the mirror to ask a deep question as Robert has done in his work.
Born: Nov. 9, 1924 in Zürich, SwitzerlandIn 1956, he was still a relative newcomer to the United StatesHe has produced other volumes over the years and made 31 films and videos.
By 1954 his reputation was such that he was awarded the first non American Guggenheim fellowship.His masterpiece: ''The Americans,'' an intimate visual chronicle of common people in ordinary situations drawn from several trips he made through his adopted country in the mid-1950s. To create his collection of images for “The Americans” he shot 767 rolls of film yielding about 27,000 images. He edited that down to about 1,000 work prints, spread them across the floor of his studio and tacked them to the walls for a final edit. Out of a year and a half of work, Frank chose just 83 images. When Grove Press first published ''The Americans'' in 1959, a chorus of critical disdain rose from the few who bothered to write about photography at the time.
Popular Photography magazine derided Mr. Frank's black-and-white pictures of isolated individuals, teenage couples and groups at funerals for their ''meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.
Today Mr. Frank is viewed as a pioneer of the snapshot aesthetic, a term coined in the late 1960s to denote the spontaneous style and modest subject matter that came to dominate black-and-white photography of that period When Mr. Frank arrived in New York from Zurich, he had been an apprentice for several design and photography studios and was well tutored in the visual ideas that defined Modernism in Europe between the world wars.
Technique/Subject Matter:
Robert Franks work is created to give the viewer a new way of seeing the world with the use of grainy, dramatic, blurred and tilted shots.
Frank rarely spoke to his subjects; he chose to point, shoot and move along. He investigated the gaudy insanities and strangely touching contradictions of American culture. Robert shot subject matter everyone was familiar with, but no one had accepted without condescension these facts as the basis for a coherent iconography for our time.
The ordinary, incidental moments captured in his pictures -- and their raw, informal look -- paved the way for photographers like Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand a decade later. His style was summed up by the beat author Jack Kerouac who said in his introduction to The Americans in 1959 "Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand, he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world".
Why I was Influenced:
I enjoy Robert's controversial work such as the girl smoking a cigarette. This questions what society thinks is right or wrong, and what society thinks is art or not. I was also influenced by his work of words written on mirrors. I played with mirrors a lot in my last project with Pinholes, so I was intrigued by his mirror photographs. I also liked the idea of writing on the mirror because it would make the photograph more personal and have a clearer focus.
He shot normal everyday life. I used this concept in my work by shooting myself in a bathroom because it is an everyday place everyone goes. I wrote on the mirror to ask a deep question as Robert has done in his work.