Frank, Robert G., 1952-2019
The MFAH serves as the archive and distributor of film and video by internationally renowned photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank (1924–2019). New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis has called Frank “one of the most important and influential American independent filmmakers of the last half-century.” Best known for his photography, Frank gained worldwide attention in the 1950s with his book The Americans. He turned to filmmaking in 1959, when he codirected the experimental Pull My Daisy with Alfred Leslie.
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Robert Frank, one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, whose visually raw and personally expressive style was pivotal in changing the course of documentary photography, died on Monday in Inverness, Nova Scotia. He was 94.
His death, at Inverness Consolidated Memorial Hospital on Cape Breton Island, was confirmed by Peter MacGill, whose Pace-MacGill Gallery in Manhattan has represented Mr. Frank’s work since 1983. Mr. Frank, a Manhattan resident, had long had a summer home in Mabou, on Cape Breton Island.
Born in Switzerland, Mr. Frank emigrated to New York at the age of 23 as an artistic refugee from what he considered to be the small-minded values of his native country. He was best known for his groundbreaking book, “The Americans,” a masterwork of black and white photographs drawn from his cross-country road trips in the mid-1950s and published in 1959.
“The Americans” challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure. Mr. Frank’s photographs — of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life — were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon. The cultural critic Janet Malcolm called him the “Manet of the new photography.”
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Name Entry: Frank, Robert G., 1952-2019
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Place: Texas
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Place: United States
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Place: Houston (Tex.)
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Place: New York (State)
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Place: Rochester (N.Y.)
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