Robert Frank

Robert Frank (1924–2019, born Zurich, Switzerland) was a photographer and filmmaker whose landmark book The Americans, published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959, transformed the possibilities of documentary photography and produced one of the most influential bodies of photographic work of the twentieth century. Emigrating to the United States in 1947, Frank received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 that funded a cross-country road trip during which he made the photographs that would become The Americans. Eighty-three images selected from thousands of frames together offered a darkly honest, formally unconventional portrait of American life at the height of its postwar confidence.

The book’s oblique angles, grainy textures, and unflinching attention to loneliness and the margins of American experience met with initial resistance before quickly becoming one of the most studied and imitated photographic works of the century. From the early 1960s Frank largely turned away from still photography toward experimental filmmaking, producing a body of highly personal films that continued the restless, anti-conventional energy of his photographic work. In later decades he returned periodically to photography, producing deeply autobiographical work engaging with loss, memory, and time.

His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago.