Photography from the Inside Out: Robert Frank's Memorial Images

Everything he does is personal, and comes from the inside out.

—Rudolph Wurlitzer¹

In the early 1970s, just years after announcing that "photography was in [his] past," Robert Frank began to produce and exhibit still photographs again.² Nothing in Frank's early career as a documentary photographer could have prepared viewers for the nakedly autobiographical, visually experimental images he began to make after his return to the medium. Confronted with the new turn in Frank's work, critics responded with perplexed silence or a dismissive shrug, even as they spoke of his early work in tones of increasing reverence. When Nicholas Dawidoff profiled Frank for the New York Times Magazine in July 2015, for instance, he devoted a scant 30 words of the approximately 8,300-word profile to Frank's photography after The Americans (1958)—an imbalance that is characteristic of both popular and scholarly assessments of Frank's work and legacy.³ With the exception of celebratory essays published in exhibition catalogs, the occasional blog post, and a few scattered essays in small journals, Frank's photography from the 1970s onward—what I will refer to here as his "later work"—continues to be treated as a minor footnote to the early images that earned him a reputation as "[o]ne of the most-cited figures in twentieth century photography" and "the most influential photographer alive."⁴

Frank's turn away from still photography directly followed the publication of The Americans, a book widely considered one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century photography.⁵ Published in France in 1958 and in the United States the following year, the volume of eighty-three grainy 35-mm prints shocked viewers with its unconventional, seemingly unstudied compositions and its critical depiction of a nation riven by prejudice and inequality in the midst of material abundance.⁶ After an initially icy reception, The Americans achieved cult status in the 1960s, skyrocketing Frank to international fame and making him one of the towering figures in postwar photography, even as Frank himself embraced the relative obscurity of underground filmmaking. In 1959, he collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Alfred Leslie, and other friends to make the short film Pull My Daisy, which became a classic of the Beat movement. Frank would spend the next decade working as an independent filmmaker, his efforts after Pull My Daisy attracting little attention, even as the reputation of The Americans continued its vertiginous ascent.

The story of The Americans' rise from obscurity to international fame, dramatized by news of Frank's sudden renunciation of photography, has contributed to what W. J. T. Mitchell has called the "mythical status" of both Frank and his most famous work. "If The Americans is the great tragic poem of American photography," Mitchell writes, "Frank seems to play the role of its tragic hero, a kind of Oedipus who 'had eyes' that saw something so terrible and shocking that he felt compelled to put them out, to put his camera in a closet."⁷ This narrative is so seductive—so surprising and seemingly perverse a story—that it has largely obscured Frank's subsequent return to the medium at the beginning of the 1970s, leading critics to overlook the affective power and formal innovation of the rich, if uneven, body of work he produced over the subsequent four and a half decades.⁸

In the pages that follow, I explore the startling direction Frank's work took after his return to photography, paying particular attention to his exploration of the relationship between photography and writing. More specifically, I focus on his attempts to use forms of visual sequence, collage, and abstraction to expand the representational capacities of photography by bringing it closer to the formal, expressive conditions of writing, which he saw as a more effective vehicle for self-reflection and subjective expression. After 1971, Frank began to develop a fragmentary, increasingly abstract collage aesthetic that was both more confessional and less mimetic than his more famous documentary photographs. As my reading of these images suggests, his early turn away from photography—as well as...