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5B4: Photography and Books blog
Archive for March 8th, 2009
08
Mar
09
Exhibition: ‘Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans’ at The National Gallery of Art, Washington
Exhibition dates: National Gallery of Art, January 18–April 26, 2009; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 16–August 23, 2009; Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 22–December 27, 2009
Robert Frank
‘The Americans’
New York: Grove Press
1959
One of the seminal photography books of the twentieth century, Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ changed photography forever, changed how America saw itself and became a cult classic. Like Eugene Atget’s positioning of the camera in an earlier generation Frank’s use of camera position is unique; his grainy and contrasty images add to his outsider vision of a bleak America; his sequencing of the images, like the cadences of the greatest music, masterful. One of the easiest things for an artist to do is to create one memorable image, perhaps even a group of 4 or 5 images that ‘hang’ together – but to create a narrative of 83 images that radically alter the landscape of both photography and country is ultimately a magnificent achievement.
M Bunyan
“Released at the height of the Cold War, ‘The Americans’ was initially reviled, even decried as anti-American. Yet during the 1960s, many of the issues that Frank had addressed – racism, dissatisfaction with political leaders, skepticism about a rising consumer culture – erupted into the collective consciousness. The book came to be regarded as both prescient and revolutionary and soon was embraced with a cultlike following.
First published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank’s The Americans is widely celebrated as the most important photography book since World War II. Including 83 photographs made largely in 1955 and 1956 while Frank (b. 1924) traveled around the United States, the book looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a profound sense of alienation, angst, and loneliness. With these prophetic photographs, Frank redefined the icons of America, noting that cars, jukeboxes, gas stations, diners, and even the road itself were telling symbols of contemporary life. Frank’s style – seemingly loose, casual compositions, with often rough, blurred, out-of-focus foregrounds and tilted horizons – was just as controversial and influential as his subject matter. The exhibition celebrates the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication by presenting all 83 photographs from The Americans in the order established by the book, and by providing a detailed examination of the book’s roots in Frank’s earlier work, its construction, and its impact on his later art.”
Text from The National Gallery of Art website
Robert Frank
Contact sheets for ‘The Americans’
“Frank’s contact sheets take us back to the moment he made the photographs for ‘The Americans’. They show us what he saw as he traveled around The United States and how he responded to it. These sheets are not carefully crafted objects; in his eagerness to see what he had captured, Frank did not bother to order his film strips numerically or even to orientate them all in the same direction.”
Robert Frank
Sequencing of ‘The Americans’ numbers 32- 36
“Almost halfway through the book Frank created a sequence united by the visual repetition of the car and the suggestion of its movement.”
Robert Frank
Americans 1
‘Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey’
1955
Robert Frank
Americans 32
‘U.S. 91, Leaving Blackfoot, Idaho’
1956
Robert Frank
Americans 3
‘Political Rally – Chicago’
1956
“The photos revealed a bleaker, more dislocated view of America than Americans were used to (at least in photography). Frank’s “in-between moments” demonstrated that disequilibrium can seem more revealing, seeming to catch reality off-guard. In doing so the collection also announced to the world that photos with a completely objective reference/referent could be subjective, lyrical, reveal a state-of-mind. Looser framing, more forced or odd juxtapositions, “drive-by” photos and other elements offer a sense of the process that has produced the photos”
Lloyd Spencer on Discussing The Americans in Hardcore Street Photography
I couldn’t have put it better myself!
Robert Frank
Americans 36
‘U.S. 285, New Mexico’
1955
Elison Lecture
‘A Conversation with Robert Frank’
March 26th, 2009 at 3:30
East Building Concourse, Auditorium
Robert Frank, photographer, in conversation with Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art
Exhibition dates: 18th January – 26th April 2009
Looks a great exhibition for fans of photography books!
The notes in the exhibition brochure pdf are useful and the slide show of images is excellent.
‘foto-auge’ (photo-eye)
edited and with an introduction by Franz Roh, cover design by Jan Tschichold
(Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, Dr. Fritz Wedekind & Co., 1929)
“Also produced in conjunction with Film und Foto, this book showcases a wide variety of photographic practices as a way of examining the social importance of the medium’s ability to construct visual knowledge.”
“Held in conjunction with Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” this exhibition examines a variety of artistic and thematic approaches to the modern photography book, displaying examples that span the period from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. The photography book, more than simply a book containing photographs, is a publication composed by the careful sequencing and editing of photographic material. Often produced by a photographer, they present visual narratives through creative page design that frequently integrates photographs with text and graphic elements.
This focus exhibition organizes 21 books from the Gallery’s library into four themes: “New Visions,” “Documented Realities,” “Postwar Scenes,” and “Conceptual Practices.” It highlights diverse projects from individual photographers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Yasuhiro Ishimoto as well as collaborative projects from the Hungarian Work Circle (Munka Kör) and Andy Warhol’s Factory, revealing that the photography book is both a significant conveyer of contemporary experience and a witness to historical events.”
Yasuhiro Ishimoto
‘Aruhi Arutokoro’ (Someday, Somewhere)
preface by Tsutomu Watanabe, design by Ryuuichi Yamashiro (Tokyo: Geibi Shuppan, 1958)
“This engaging publication juxtaposes photographs taken by Ishimoto in Chicago and Tokyo. Born in the United States, Ishimoto spent his childhood in Japan and later returned to the U.S. to attend school at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Finally settling in Tokyo, he influenced a new generation of postwar Japanese photographers interested in producing books.”
“The modern photography book, more than simply a book containing photographs, is a publication composed by the careful sequencing and editing of photographic material. Often produced by a photographer, these books present visual narratives through creative page design that frequently integrates photographs with text and graphic elements. Popular across the political spectrum, photography books have been published both as art objects and as documentary records. Through their organization they foster a critical examination of the visual world, and as works of historical witness they have helped to construct cultural memories. Photography books have been a primary format for the arrangement and display of photographs, making them a vital but commonly overlooked component of the history of photography. Today they continue to provide an important forum for photographers to convey their work to a wide public audience.
Photographs have appeared in book format since their inception. For example, William Henry Fox Talbot’s commercially published The Pencil of Nature (1844) was one of the earliest explorations of photography’s narrative capabilities. Like all early photography books, Talbot’s photographs were printed separately from the letterpress text. It was not until the 1880s, with the development of the halftone plate and printing process, that mass-produced newspapers, magazines, and books regularly featured photographs. This invention, which allowed type and photographic images to be mechanically reproduced on the same press, dramatically changed the means by which the general public viewed and had access to photographs. By the 1920s the number of photographically illustrated publications had increased exponentially, and photographs regularly recounted events without explanatory text. As people began to see more and more photographs on a daily basis, they became far more visually literate. Set within this context, the modern mass-produced photography book challenged not only traditional narrative structures but also popular habits of reading and seeing.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
‘The Decisive Moment’
(New York: Simon & Schuster, in collaboration with Éditions Verve, Paris, 1952)
“An important presentation of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, this large-format book helped to popularize his work, in which a distinctive documentary approach transforms ordinary moments into remarkable photographic visions.”
The exhibition is on view in the West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 21
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
