Robert Frank was born in 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland but in the year 1947 he moved to the USA and began to shoot fashion stories for Harper's Bazaar.
As he traveled on the road around forty-eight states he captured in his photographs what he would call the crazy feeling of America, when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral.
In 1955 he decided to change tack and take different path. He embarked on an epic two-year trip across America, passing throught big cities and small communities, watching crowds and recording the statues in town squares and travellers standing motionless as if to pose.
Frank's photographs are beautiful and intensely poetic. The book "The Americans" is the collection of photographs he took while travel and is the ultimate celebration of reportage photography, presented as series rather than as individual shots. Everyting about those photographs is American and everything is equally meaningful bacause the photographs are a testament to the very heart of the continent, which reveals itself only through fragments and only through the wonderstruck, sensitive gaze of a foreigner.
In 1960s Frank moved away from photography to concentrate on film, pocking up his camera again in the mid 1970s. In 1994 he donated the majority of his work to the National Gallery of Art in Washington,DC.
http://theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/the-photography-of-robert-frank-the-americans-50th-anniversary-tribute/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank
As he traveled on the road around forty-eight states he captured in his photographs what he would call the crazy feeling of America, when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral.
In 1955 he decided to change tack and take different path. He embarked on an epic two-year trip across America, passing throught big cities and small communities, watching crowds and recording the statues in town squares and travellers standing motionless as if to pose.
Frank's photographs are beautiful and intensely poetic. The book "The Americans" is the collection of photographs he took while travel and is the ultimate celebration of reportage photography, presented as series rather than as individual shots. Everyting about those photographs is American and everything is equally meaningful bacause the photographs are a testament to the very heart of the continent, which reveals itself only through fragments and only through the wonderstruck, sensitive gaze of a foreigner.
In 1960s Frank moved away from photography to concentrate on film, pocking up his camera again in the mid 1970s. In 1994 he donated the majority of his work to the National Gallery of Art in Washington,DC.
http://theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/the-photography-of-robert-frank-the-americans-50th-anniversary-tribute/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank
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