The Americans: A Closer Look

Opening: Saturday, 28 September 2024, 3 – 6pm
Introduction by David Campany, author and curator 

Robert Frank is considered one of the most influential figures in the history of photography. He redefined the aesthetic of both the still and moving image through his pictures and films. Coinciding with the centenary of Frank’s birth, Zander Galerie is delighted to present a closer look at his iconic body of work The Americans. The complete set of 83 photographs will be on view with one further image added later by the artist. Related contact sheets and three of Frank’s later films illuminate the genesis of The Americans and its reverberations throughout his oeuvre. Last year, Zander Galerie was honored to announce the representation of Robert Frank in Europe in collaboration with The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation and Pace Gallery. This is the first exhibition of Frank’s work at Zander Galerie Cologne. Born in Zurich in 1924, Robert Frank emigrated to New York in 1947, where he was soon hired as a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. After receiving his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, Frank embarked on a series of road trips across the United States, during which he took over 28,000 photographs. 83 of those images were published in Frank’s landmark monograph The Americans.

With his photographs in The Americans, taken between 1954 and 1957, Frank peered beneath the surface of American life, capturing the country’s darkness and beauty. The images represent a collective portrait of American identity, culture, and politics—inflected by racial, economic, and regional divisions. It was not just the subject matter that made Frank’s project so innovative. His unorthodox cropping, lighting, and sense of focus went against widely held aesthetic sensibilities at the time. Now The Americans is seen as one of the most groundbreaking photography books ever produced. Its impact on subsequent generations of artists—from photographers, filmmakers and painters to musicians and writers—cannot be overstated.

The set of gelatin silver prints on view, printed under Frank’s supervision in 1983, is drawn from the artist’s archive at The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. It is one of three complete sets of 84 prints in its size, and the only one available today. The two other sets produced are in museum collections. Frank’s one addition to his original sequence of The Americans is a print made in 1978 to appear at the very end of Aperture’s 20th anniversary reissue of the book. It comprises three frames of Frank’s children and wife in their car on the roadside and a truck stop sign with the handwritten title “Andrea, Mary and Pablo, Texas 1956”.

Twelve contact sheets illuminate the chronology of photographs Robert Frank took on his trips across the country and his image selection for The Americans. The contact sheets on view were printed in the 1970s. They represent one of only two existing sets of prints, the second is in the collection of Tate Modern, London. After completing the body of work for The Americans, Frank expanded his practice and committed himself to filmmaking. His films are characterized by an improvisational quality that belies their careful planning. The three films on view in the exhibition relate back to The Americans in one way or another: This Song for Jack (1983), shot on 16 mm film, is an homage to Beat writer Jack Kerouac who wrote the introduction to The Americans. The film records the gathering of some of his contemporaries, among them William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who read from Kerouac’s work in an act of mourning. The video film Home Improvements (1985) is a kind of film diary on a period of Frank’s family life. In one scene the artist discusses The Americans while someone is drilling a hole through the photographs. He later used this stack of prints to make a work that is now in the collection of the National Gallery. The silent video film Moving Pictures (1994) also references The Americans, dealing with themes of memory and the past. In a fragmentary sequence of the film we see Frank’s photographs and photo albums flipped through. The last scene bears the caption “Keep busy”. Through collage, montage and the use of text Robert Frank established his own hybrid form between the still and moving image, and often returned to artist’s books of his photographs and words. Since 1970 he lived part-time in Nova Scotia, with his wife, the artist June Leaf. Robert Frank died in 2019 in Inverness, Canada, at the age of ninety-four. In a career spanning over fifty years, he produced a body of work that defies easy classification beyond its singularly experimental nature.

To mark the centenary of Robert Frank’s birth, exhibitions of his work are on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Fotomuseum and Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Albertina Museum in Vienna.

Frank received two Guggenheim Fellowships, an American Film Institute grant, the Hasselblad Award, the International Center of Photography Award, honorary PhDs from the University of Gothenburg and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax, and the Edward MacDowell Medal, among other honors. His work is collected by international institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fotomuseum Winterthur; George Eastman House, Rochester; Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Tate Modern, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 1990 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., established the Robert Frank Collection, comprised primarily of prints, negatives and contact sheets.