Photo of the Week #332

January 13, 2025
This symbolically rich photograph contains so much of Robert Frank's life and work, that it can be seen as a kind of self-portrait. After Frank's book The Americans (1959) upended the photography world, and after his subsequent shift from street photography to film and mixed media, his embrace of a reclusive life in Mabou, Nova Scotia seemed like a further retreat from a towering reputation that he never seemed fully comfortable with

The three wind-blown works that Frank pinned on a line in front of the Gulf of St. Lawrence amount to a personal chronology. On the left, we see a photo that Frank took on a transatlantic ocean liner in 1952 on a return trip to the U.S.—Frank had emigrated to America in 1947 but still traveled restlessly between the U.S. and Europe in the early 1950s. The iconic print in the center was published in The Americans and shows a tuba player at a political rally in Chicago, with the musician's face obscured entirely by the bell of the instrument, in a depiction that could be read as part of the book's critical view of American bombast. On the right, the bit of fabric inscribed with "words" seems to allude both to his increasing use of text in his work, and instances in which words might fail him.

Three years before this photograph was taken, Frank's daughter Andrea had died in a plane crash in Guatemala, and his process of grief played out in his artwork. In this photograph, Frank seems to be exposing the sum of his artistic achievements to everything that the wintry seaside landscape might offer, both its unforgiving elements and its wide open beauty.