San Francisco, 1956: A photograph and its afterlife

299 hen robert frank died last September, it was both unsurprising and shocking. Unsurprising because he was, after all, 94 years old, and no one lives forever; shocking because his passing leaves a hole in American photography —in American art—that is intolerably large. I can’t think of a single living artist who has as secure a status in his or her chosen field, and I doubt there will be one for some time. In the days and weeks that followed, nearly everyone had something to say about him: critics and curators, other photographers, anyone who had met him—as, it seemed, almost everyone had. Even for eulogies, these were unusually loving: he was an endearingly open and thoughtful man, both gentle and exacting. I myself interviewed him once, and had lunch with him once. The word I San Francisco, 1956 A photograph and its afterlife Jim Lewis art w Robert Frank, San Francisco, 1956. SAN FRANCISCO, 1956 | 301 would use is “soulful.” But when the tributes are done and history gets back onto its implacable path, being soulful doesn’t count for much. One becomes a great photographer by taking great photographs , and that he surely did. It’s curious to notice, then, that almost the entirety of Frank’s reputation rests upon a single work, a book of photos that he made on a two-year-long road trip that looped all through the United States. He called it The Americans, and it was first published in France in 1958, and then in the US in 1959, when he was thirtyfive . Much work followed: some photographs, though not very many, then photo-painting hybrids, art films, budgetless features and documentaries, including an infamous one about the Rolling Stones. Much sorrow followed as well. He had always been a melancholy man, and as the years passed it proved prophetic: both of his children died young, one in a plane crash and one by suicide. I’m not comfortable airing these facts, but there they are. He was less shy about them than I am. “I expressed in my pictures something that haunted me, that I had to express,” he said to me, then a stranger interviewing him on the telephone, “whether it was about my family, or the place that I lived in, or the solitude, or the darkness, or the absurdity.” He said it matter-of-factly, the way most people would say they’d had trouble getting their car started that morning. Later, he spoke of “the disappearance of love, or getting di≠erent in your life, or the struggle for money” in much the same tone. the pictures, though. There’s one from The Americans that I’ve loved from the moment I first saw it; as it happens, it was Frank’s favorite, too, and many others’. It’s called San Francisco, and it was taken in Alamo Square Park in 1956. It is an unruly and liberating photograph, both loaded and elusive, and, so far as I know, quite unlike any picture that had ever been published before, at least in an art setting. When Cezanne first broke the picture plane into an assembly of tiled forms, when Picasso multiplied perspectives, they transformed both their chosen medium and human visual experience . This picture did something like that. Let me begin by pointing out that much of what makes it so good is that it’s so incontestably bad. The horizon is skewed, and with it the path and road and building-tops, giving the whole composition a slightly sickening, o≠-kilter feel, like a picture from a ship’s deck in a storm. In cinematography this is called a “Dutch angle,” and it was much used in both expressionist and horror movies, but in this case it seems to be a byproduct of haste. Moreover, the background details are washed out, over-exposed, the highlights blown. The main figures, a couple surprised during an afternoon tryst, are jammed into the bottom of the frame and cut o≠ at her waist and his lower shoulder. If they weren’t staring at the camera, you might think the focus of the picture was supposed to...