Robert Frank

 Robert Frank is a Swiss-born American photographer best known for a volume of photos from 1958 called The Americans. Unintentionally, it is a grittier look at American life than was presented in the American photographs contributed to the well-known photo anthology The Family of Man by Edward Steichen, from 1955.

It was in 1955, funded by a Guggenheim grant, that Frank packed up his family and took a series of road trips that yielded some of the most iconic images of an America that doesn't always like itself. Having met beat writer Jack Kerouac on one of those trips, Frank showed Jack some of his portfolio and Jack agreed to write the introduction. Poet Allan Ginsberg became a life-long friend of Frank; their respective forms of expression were compatible in their shared viewpoint on class and race differences and the underclass that reared its head despite the rosy, American-as-apple-pie depictions in the mainstream.

Needless to say, Frank had a difficult time finding an American publisher and thus the book was published first in Paris. Les Américain was to finally be published in the U.S. a year later and was met with substantial criticism, not only for its subject matter but also what was then unorthodox photographic techniques such as blurred images and off-kilter perspectives.

The eighty-three photographs contained in the book, were culled from the twenty-seven thousand photos he took in Detroit, Miami, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and Butte, Montana, among other places.

While driving through Arkansas in 1955, Frank was stopped, detained and questioned by police for "suspicious activity", which included being in possession of several cameras.

Here is a sampling of what I think are the most evocative photographs from The Americans.

  " I don't call my photographs masterpieces."

 Hoboken, New Jersey

 

 Charlestown, South Carolina

 Butte, Montana

 Detroit, Michigan

Frank produced a few films, the most notorious of which is  Pull My Daisy, an adaptation from an act in Jack Kerouac's unfinished play, The Beat Generation. The title of the film is a poem by Allan Ginsberg,  who stars in and narrates the film. To my surprise, the American painter Alice Neel was also involved in the film.

Other Frank films include Sin of Jesus and Cocksucker Blues, a unreleased documentary film about The Rolling Stones; to this day mired in legal red tape.

Frank returned to photography after moving to Cape Breton Nova Scotia, his still work taking on a very personal and introspective vein after a couple of personal tragedies, including the death of his daughter in a 1974 plane crash.

Related Links and Resources:

Vanity Fair - Robert Frank's Unsentimental Journey

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The New Yorker - the journey of Robert Frank's "The Americans"

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NPR: The Americans - the book that changed photography

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YouTube:  Inside Robert Frank's America

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American Society of Cinematographers: Robert Franks: The Americans

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PetaPixel:  Robert Frank Detained by Police in 1955

The Friday Evening Nudes

The nudes of Edward Steichen

One of the most influential figures in the history of photography, Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was also one of the most prolific and diverse. No other photographer can claim a leading role among the Photo-Secessionists, vibrant innovation in fashion photography, chief photographer for Condé Nast's Vogue and Vanity Fair, war photography born of two world wars, signature celebrity portraiture, and the title of curator at MOMA/NY where he conceived the groundbreaking exhibition, The Family of Man, viewed by nine million people in thirty-eight countries.  more here

 

 1903

 Nude with Cat

 Torso

1902

In 1913 Alfred Stieglitz devoted a double issue of Camera Work to Steichen's photographs. He wrote in the magazine: "Nothing I have ever done has given me quite so much satisfaction as finally sending this number out into the world." 

(Dust Grain Sheet Fed Photogravure)

1905

"Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?"

~ Richard Corliss

Art Foraging - The Latest Catch

Online this week, I perused the work of David Alfaro Siqueros...

 Photographer Tina Modotti...

three Andrew Wyeth paintings I was previously unfamiliar with...

and these fascinating images of our planet Earth, from the exhibition Earth As Art, at the Library of Congress

and lastly, a rare photo of Andy Warhol by William John Kennedy
article here

Artist Birthdays in March

 It's artist birthday remembrance for March!

Van Gogh has a birthday coming up March 30 and surely by then I can start thinking if not of Irises just yet, at least of a crocus or two. 

A long before Van Gogh but on the same day,  Francisco de Goya was born in 1746.

March 6 was the birthday of Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni ((6 March 1475 – 18 February).

American photographer Diane (Nemerov) Arbus was born on March 14, 1923 and died in 1971, in New York City.

Diane Arbus

Self-Portrait

March 7 was American modernist painter Milton Avery's birthday, born in 1885 in Sand Bank, New York

Self-Portrait

Georgia on my Mind

Alfred Stieglitz was 54 when Georgia arrived in New York...23 years her senior. Educated in Berlin, he had studied engineering and photography before returning to the States at the turn of the century and opening the 291 gallery. He pioneered the art of photography, and single-handedly introduced America to the works of Picasso, Matisse, and Cezanne at the gallery...along with publishing his well respected "Camera Works" magazine.
Shortly after her arrival, Alfred took Georgia up to the Stieglitz family home at Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains. They would return to the lake home each summer for years to come. Georgia produced many paintings of the Lake George countryside during these years.
Stieglitz had become obsessed with photographing Georgia since the beginning of their relationship. He would take over 300 portraits of her between 1918 and 1937. Most of the more erotic poses would be in the first few years of their marriage.  Read more here

  Georgia O'Keeffe—Hand and Breasts
1919

This photograph, one of more than 300 images Stieglitz made of O'Keeffe (1887–1986) between 1917 and 1937, is part of an extraordinary composite portrait. Stieglitz believed that portraiture concerned more than merely the face and that it should be a record of a person's entire experience, a mosaic of expressive movements, emotions, and gestures that would function collectively to evoke a life. "To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person," he claimed, "is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still."

The photographs of O'Keeffe taken in those first twenty four months document the most intense, passionate, and complex transaction ever recorded between a man and woman by a camera. Stieglitz's portrait embraces the most public and private extremes of O'Keeffe's being: icons of a remote, enigmatic woman that merged with her paintings to create her identity as artist together with sexual explorations of her body so intimate they have yet to be published

Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe

Arnold Newman

1942

   Sources:

Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive

Alfred Stieglitz: Georgia O'Keeffe 

(1997.61.19) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Happy Birthday Ms. Georgia O'Keeffe

November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986

American Artist 

Blogging lite today, my friends...blogging light.  ;-) 


All the love,
Pagan Sphinx

Spoofing Manet (via Bow Wow Wow)

I attended a really cool photo exhibition called Who Shot Rock and Roll a few weeks ago at the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, where I saw this photo parody of Manet's Luncheon on the Grass. It is the cover of an album jacket by the pop-punk band Bow Wow Wow.  The album is Go Wild in the Country and its cover generated nearly as much controversy as Manet's painting, some one hundred and twenty years later. Check out the link.

1982

Andy Earle

1863

And if you've never heard anything by Bow Wow Wow- go ahead - go wild in the country! 

;-)

Artist of the Week: Man Ray

Man Ray

1890-1976

“I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.”
–Man Ray

"Legendary Photography, painter, and maker of objects and films, Man Ray was on the most versatile and inventive artists of this century. Born in Philadelphia in 1890, he knew the worlds of Greenwich Village in the avant garde era following the 1913 Armory show; Paris in the 1920's and 1930's, where he played a key role in the Dada and Surrealist movements; The Hollywood of the 1940s, where he joined others chased by war from their homes in Europe; and finally, Paris again until his death in 1976. "

From Man Ray Trust

(everything you ever wanted to know about him and a complete image archive)

 

Self-portrait

The Gift

1921

"Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information." – Man Ray 

Kiki de Montparnasse

1922

...a wild, impetuous, amoral woman at a time when, beyond bohemian circles, women were often still expected to be seen and not heard. "All I need is an onion, a bit of bread, and a bottle of red," Kiki once said. "And I will always find somebody to offer me that."   read more: Kiki: The Queen of Bohemia

 Noire et Blanche

 Electricity
1926

(the model is Kiki) 

Man Ray began work in several mediums: sculpture, film, painting and photography were just some of his many passions. His earliest works were fairly static, inspired mostly by cubism and expressionism. It was only when Marcel Duchamp befriended him that he began to add movement to his works; his focus changed to Surrealism and Dadaism. Together the two founded the Society of Independent Artists in 1916, and published a single issue of New York Dada.

Kiki de Montparnasse in a variante of "Violons d'Ingres"

 

In 1921 he coined the term “rayograph” for a cameraless process using objects to block light and embed their image on light sensitive paper. In his homage to a revered master, “Le violon d’Ingres”(“Ingres’ Violin,” 1924), Ray combined a rayographic technique with a regular photograph, overlaying the curving f-holes from a violin onto a photograph of the naked back of his model and mistress, Kiki.

1929

Man Ray tried to create a Surrealist vision of the female form, and utilized solarization, cropping, over development (various photographic techniques) to create a surreal effect in his photographs.

Tears

1930

Lee Miller's Neck

1930

Lee Miller

Dora Maar

French photographer, poet and painter best know for being a lover and muse of Pablo Picasso


Having broken with his wife, Man Ray left New York for Paris in 1921—marking a continuous stream of tempestuous and often doomed romances. Through Duchamp, Man Ray met some of the most exciting artists and thinkers in Paris. Though he didn’t speak a word of French at first, he was welcomed into this group and became its unofficial photographer. Among the many models from this period were Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, Gertude Stein, James Joyce, and the famous performer, Kiki of Montparnasse. For six years Kiki was Ray’s constant model, muse and lover

Pablo Picasso

 Dali

 Gertrude Stein
(Of "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" fame. I still scratch my head over how Stein ever became known as a writer, but that's just me.)

Henri Matisse

 Jean Cocteau


Paintings

 After Lunch

1919

Sculpture

Le Cadeau (The Gift)

is an early readymade by Man Ray (with the assistance of Erik Satie), consisting of an iron with fourteen nails glued to its sole, made in 1921 in Paris.

Much like Oppenheim’s Object, Gift is a conjunction of two alien objects. One represents domesticity and possibly femininity; the other represents carpentry and hence masculinity. The sheer failure of Gift as something practical makes the object a poor gift -- ironic naming on Ray’s part.

Film