Robert Frank at SFMOMA

May 29, 4:49 PMSF Art ExaminerMarisa Nakasone

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SFMOMA's latest exhibition,  Looking In: Robert Frank's 'The Americans,' provides a comprehensive look at Frank's seminal photographic book, whose popularity and influence continues to endure well into its fiftieth anniversary. The exhibition's strength is girded by the context it provides to understand the Swiss-born Frank as an artist.   The show opens with Frank's early work from his travels in the Americas and a series  entitled Black, White, and Things--the immediacy and themes of which are explored and developed in The Americans.  Contact sheets, work prints, drafts of Frank's Guggenheim grant application, letters to Jack Kerouac and Walker Evans allow viewers to explore the ideas that inform Frank's stylistic and formal decisions for The Americans prior to its publication. The exhibition concludes with an assembly of work by contemporaries of Frank as well as the work of contemporary artists who have inherited Frank's photographic legacy, including Walker Evans, Lee Friendlander, Diane Arbus, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, and Jim Goldberg.  (Pictured above: Political Rally--Chicago, 1956). 

The Americans introduced an unprecedented critique on American society that is best understood as a sober response to the affirmative, open-and-shut narratives that characterized popular photography in magazines such as Look! and Life.   Frank's photographs projected America and its people as isolated; compromised by racism and classism, distracted by consumerism, and stilted by a culture of assent. (Pictured above: Trolley--New Orleans, 1955).

Though his outsider eye cast a harsh gaze on American values, it was not one of pure jaundice; indeed, Frank's photographs seem to express a sense of awe and the potential for redemption, as Kerouac penned in the introduction, Frank, "with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness, and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scnes that have never been seen before on film...The humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and Americanness of these pictures!"   Indeed, the societal tensions and visible ennui expressed in Frank's images seem to foreshadow the upheaval of the sixties  (Pictured above: San Francisco, 1956) .

Initially exhibited in a book format, the images from The Americans were arranged such that each image would be viewed one at a time--allowing viewers to take note of the formal and conceptual connection from one photo to the next.  Though the book format imbues the photographs with a narrative quality, descriptive text does not accompany the images and indeed, the "narrative" has no conclusive beginning, or end; making for a very dynamic interaction between Frank's work and the viewer's interpretation. Though the camera never turns around to depict Frank himself, one sees the world through his eyes and sees his reflection in mirrored surfaces--we hear his voice loud and clear through his stylistic decisions, his chosen subjects. (Pictured above: US 90 en route to Del Rio, Texas, 1955).

Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans" is on view at SFMOMA through August 23, 2009.