<p> With one book, Robert Frank changed photography. Now a fine
new show fills out the picture
</p>
<p>By Richard Lacayo
</p>
<p> To say that Robert Frank is among the most important living
photographers is a statement so at odds with his rough-edged
accomplishment that it obscures its own point. Frank is the
genius of the marginal and the unofficial. The nondescript corner
of some ratty diner in South Carolina, the smudged window that
opens onto the dreariest rooftops in Butte, Montana, the vacant
stare of an elevator operator in Miami Beach--these are things
the Swiss-born Frank decided were central to comprehending his
adopted nation. Important is a funny word to attach to a man
so suspicious of whatever is well regarded and so indifferent
to success.
</p>
<p> All the same, no other word will do. Frank's great book, The
Americans, 83 black-and-white pictures, published in France
in 1958 and in the U.S. one year later, was one of the pivotal
events of postwar photography. Its skepticism toward what was
then the secular religion of wholesomeness and cheer, its resistance
to charm, its out-of-focus foregrounds and deranged angles--above all, its strange new mood of cool melancholy--were met
with shock at the time. The reception it got from critics--"warped" and "joyless" were two of the milder descriptions--is photography's own version of the opening-night riot that
greeted Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
</p>
<p> But in the 1960s, amid the general decay of national certainties,
Frank's book made the transition from infamous to revered. Suddenly
his gloom seemed prophetic. His faith that the best pictures
were tentative, imperfect and free of rhetoric became the model
for any photographer coming to grips with the ambiguities of
the American civilization. After a while his difficult vision
of things was so well loved and widely imitated that it verged
on becoming a late 20th century salon style: downer picturesque.
</p>
<p> So great was the eventual impact of The Americans that Frank,
now 70, can seem like a man whose career begins and ends with
a single book. Inevitably, the photographs that come from it
are at the center of "Robert Frank: Moving Out," a retrospective
of his work that opened last week at the National Gallery of
Art in Washington and that over the next 18 months will move
to Yokohama, Zurich, Amsterdam, New York City and Los Angeles.
But with this show it is possible to see the pictures as part
of the bumpy course of Frank's larger career. It's a trip as
harrowing in its way, as moving and mysterious, as any of the
ones he made across the U.S.
</p>
<p> When he arrived in New York from Switzerland in 1947, Frank
carried with him a streak of the wistfulness to be found in
the German Romantic painters of the 19th century. One picture
he took of himself, seen from behind as he looks down upon the
wake of the ship that is bringing him to America, could even
be an update of Caspar David Friedrich's icon of the Romantic
sensibility, a young man with his back to the viewer as he contemplates
an Alpine mist. In camera treks around Britain, France, Spain
and Peru that he made in his early 20s, all the while working
his way through a variety of photographic influences, it was
Frank's wintry indisposition that linked his work from every
setting and inflected what he took from any predecessor. The
stark readings of American life in Walker Evans, the complicated
street scenes made by Andre Kertesz in Paris and the much moodier
ones of Bill Brandt in London all had their impact on his own
pictures. What matters is that around any corner Frank could
find a grave conjunction like the one in London. On the left
side a young girl runs down a street; on the right the open
door of what appears to be a hearse offers its gloomy invitation.
Like one of the forbidding plazas painted by De Chirico, the
scene never settles into a single, pat meaning, but all the
possibilities are sobering.
</p>
<p> That was the mental climate that Frank brought with him on the
cross-country trips he made for The Americans, sometimes in
the company of his wife and two young children. In his successful
application for the Guggenheim grant that would support his
travels, he promised to create a picture of "the kind of civilization
born here and spreading elsewhere." In the end he made what
any artist would: a portrait of what occurred when his mood
fell upon things that lay before him.
</p>
<p> Though he was not the first to discover what was bleak or shrill
or dreary in American life--the painter Edward Hopper and
the writer Nathanael West, to name two, got there before him--he bore down on it with an immigrant's unsparing eye. (For
one thing, as a European Jew who had grown up under the threat
of Hitler, he understood that a society always proclaiming itself
pure and wholesome is instantly suspect.) When he found consolation,
it was in the sheer, sometimes radiant endurance of African
Americans, outsiders of a kind themselves, and in the big, spectral
jukeboxes that glowed like hearths in roadside bars. They pop
up all over his book, along with the American flag, an ambiguous
banner that hangs threadbare over a Fourth of July picnic and
provides deadpan cover for an onlooker in Parade--Hoboken,
New Jersey.
</p>
<p> In the late '50s Frank gave up photography to concentrate on
the underground films and videos he started making in 1959 with
Pull My Daisy, a loopy encounter between a bishop and a group
of Beat poets. (Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso play at playing
themselves, while Jack Kerouac narrates.) His turn to film and
video became a kind of disappearance, a plunge into one of the
art world's more obscure undertakings even as his work became
ever more preoccupied with his personal life. When he was commissioned
to make a documentary about American musicians, he managed to
turn it into something called About Me: A Musical.
</p>
<p> So for years, not much was heard from Frank, who spends much
of his time in remote Mabou, Nova Scotia, with his second wife,
the artist June Leaf. His documentary about the Rolling Stones'
1973 North American tour remains mostly a legend because of
its famously unprintable title and its long, unblinking episodes
of sex and drugs. Even the Stones, never ones to be too fussy
about their image, thought it advisable to obtain a court injunction
that still makes the movie almost impossible to show.
</p>
<p> Soon after, when Frank resumed work in still photography, it
was partly to come to terms with the grief brought on by the
mental illness of his son Pablo and the death of his daughter
Andrea in a plane crash at the age of 21. His new pictures were
different. Typically, several prints were grouped roughly together
with despairing messages inked across them. The romantic self-absorption
that lent power to his work in the '50s began to obscure every
other concern. If previously Frank's mood shaped his pictures
of the larger world, now we were expected simply to make what
we could of his private sorrows.
</p>
<p> It's a method that can still work in a picture like Mabou. To
commemorate his daughter's death, Frank combined eight photographs
of fence posts and telephone poles, cenotaphs against a gray
sky, then wrote his dedication across them in a heartbroken
scrawl. What he made has the clear poignancy of a gravestone.
More often, though, Frank settles so deeply into the rubble
of his own life that few can hope to follow. In one of his self-examining
videos, Home Improvements, he explains to the camera, "I am
always looking outside, trying to look inside." He's right--this retrospective makes you recognize how he took pictures
largely as a way to make sense of himself. And also how, for
one stunning moment in the '50s, that allowed him to make sense
