The Long, Winding Road

By Richard Lacayo

To say that Robert Frank is among the most important living photographers is a statement so at odds with his rough-edged accomplishment that it obscures its own point. Frank is the genius of the marginal and the unofficial. The nondescript corner of some ratty diner in South Carolina, the smudged window that opens onto the dreariest rooftops in Butte, Montana, the vacant stare of an elevator operator in Miami Beach -- these are things the Swiss-born Frank decided were central to comprehending his adopted nation. Important is a funny word to attach to a man so suspicious of whatever is well regarded and so indifferent to success.

+ All the same, no other word will do. Frank's great book, The Americans, 83 black-and-white pictures, published in France in 1958 and in the U.S. one year later, was one of the pivotal events of postwar photography. Its skepticism toward what was then the secular religion of wholesomeness and cheer, its resistance to charm, its out-of-focus foregrounds and deranged angles -- above all, its strange new mood of cool melancholy -- were met with shock at the time. The reception it got from critics -- "warped" and "joyless" were two of the milder descriptions -- is photography's own version of the opening- night riot that greeted Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

But in the 1960s, amid the general decay of national certainties, Frank's book made the transition from infamous to revered. Suddenly his gloom seemed prophetic. His faith that the best pictures were tentative, imperfect and free of rhetoric became the model for any photographer coming to grips with the ambiguities of the American civilization. After a while his difficult vision of things was so well loved and widely imitated that it verged on becoming a late 20th century salon style: downer picturesque.

So great was the eventual impact of The Americans that Frank, now 70, can seem like a man whose career begins and ends with a single book. Inevitably, the photographs that come from it are at the center of "Robert Frank: Moving Out," a retrospective of his work that opened last week at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and that over the next 18 months will move to Yokohama, Zurich, Amsterdam, New York City and Los Angeles. But with this show it is possible to see the pictures as part of the bumpy course of Frank's larger career. It's a trip as harrowing in its way, as moving and mysterious, as any of the ones he made across the U.S.

When he arrived in New York from Switzerland in 1947, Frank carried with him a streak of the wistfulness to be found in the German Romantic painters of the 19th century. One picture he took of himself, seen from behind as he looks down upon the wake of the ship that is bringing him to America, could even be an update of Caspar David Friedrich's icon of the Romantic sensibility, a young man with his back to the viewer as he contemplates an Alpine mist. In camera treks around Britain, France, Spain and Peru that he made in his early 20s, all the while working his way through a variety of photographic influences, it was Frank's wintry indisposition that linked his work from every setting and inflected what he took from any predecessor. The stark readings of American life in Walker Evans, the complicated street scenes made by Andre Kertesz in Paris and the much moodier ones of Bill Brandt in London all had their impact on his own pictures. What matters is that around any corner Frank could find a grave conjunction like the one in London. On the left side a young girl runs down a street; on the right the open door of what appears to be a hearse offers its gloomy invitation. Like one of the forbidding plazas painted by De Chirico, the scene never settles into a single, pat meaning, but all the possibilities are sobering.

That was the mental climate that Frank brought with him on the cross-country trips he made for The Americans, sometimes in the company of his wife and two young children. In his successful application for the Guggenheim grant that would support his travels, he promised to create a picture of "the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere." In the end he made what any artist would: a portrait of what occurred when his mood fell upon things that lay before him.

Though he was not the first to discover what was bleak or shrill or dreary in American life -- the painter Edward Hopper and the writer Nathanael West, to name two, got there before him -- he bore down on it with an immigrant's unsparing eye. (For one thing, as a European Jew who had grown up under the threat of Hitler, he understood that a society always proclaiming itself pure and wholesome is instantly suspect.) When he found consolation, it was in the sheer, sometimes radiant endurance of African Americans, outsiders of a kind themselves, and in the big, spectral jukeboxes that glowed like hearths in roadside bars. They pop up all over his book, along with the American flag, an ambiguous banner that hangs threadbare over a Fourth of July picnic and provides deadpan cover for an onlooker in Parade -- Hoboken, New Jersey.

In the late '50s Frank gave up photography to concentrate on the underground films and videos he started making in 1959 with Pull My Daisy, a loopy encounter between a bishop and a group of Beat poets. (Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso play at playing themselves, while Jack Kerouac narrates.) His turn to film and video became a kind of disappearance, a plunge into one of the art world's more obscure undertakings even as his work became ever more preoccupied with his personal life. When he was commissioned to make a documentary about American musicians, he managed to turn it into something called About Me: A Musical.

So for years, not much was heard from Frank, who spends much of his time in remote Mabou, Nova Scotia, with his second wife, the artist June Leaf. His documentary about the Rolling Stones' 1973 North American tour remains mostly a legend because of its famously unprintable title and its long, unblinking episodes of sex and drugs. Even the Stones, never ones to be too fussy about their image, thought it advisable to obtain a court injunction that still makes the movie almost impossible to show.

Soon after, when Frank resumed work in still photography, it was partly to come to terms with the grief brought on by the mental illness of his son Pablo and the death of his daughter Andrea in a plane crash at the age of 21. His new pictures were different. Typically, several prints were grouped roughly together with despairing messages inked across them. The romantic self- absorption that lent power to his work in the '50s began to obscure every other concern. If previously Frank's mood shaped his pictures of the larger world, now we were expected simply to make what we could of his private sorrows.

It's a method that can still work in a picture like Mabou. To commemorate his daughter's death, Frank combined eight photographs of fence posts and telephone poles, cenotaphs against a gray sky, then wrote his dedication across them in a heartbroken scrawl. What he made has the clear poignancy of a gravestone. More often, though, Frank settles so deeply into the rubble of his own life that few can hope to follow. In one of his self-examining videos, Home Improvements, he explains to the camera, "I am always looking outside, trying to look inside." He's right -- this retrospective makes you recognize how he took pictures largely as a way to make sense of himself. And also how, for one stunning moment in the '50s, that allowed him to make sense of everything else around him.