Alexey Brodovitch, the magazine’s art director, was among several influential figures who later wrote recommendations for Frank when he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955. His photograph of the African-American nanny holding the white baby is one that still speaks volumes to me today. Nina Berman’s wide-ranging work looks at American politics and resilience. And they conveyed unpalatable realities that other photographers typically did not confront. © Robert Frank). I’d walked around with my Leica for days and years believing that maybe I would find a moment that meant something about that space, and that time, and the people who passed by looking and searching. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The … Ruddy Roye has photographed ordinary people and their sometimes gritty lives for over a decade, inspired by his homeland, Jamaica. Get the best of Smithsonian magazine by email. A genius. Robert Frank came to artistic eminence following the publication of his seminal book The Americans which is regarded to this day as one of the most influential photography projects of the 20th century. Being one, you must carry the title forever. Issues that have always resonated with me were race and class. Robert Frank … Robert Frank’s “The Americans” was very much an influence on my early development as a photographer. I see the same images in my neighborhood in Park Slope, where I grew up. He works with text and images, often forming long-term collaborations with his subjects. “Life can be good,” he once said in an interview, “then you lie down, and stare up at the ceiling, and the sadness falls on you.” Frank taught me how to make a life out of looking — with honesty, both outward and inward. His first photographic work was in fashion photography … “You have so much privilege,” he said. I’ve needed Robert Frank differently throughout my life — his Jewishness, his downtown-ness, his irreverence toward photographic convention. Once again, Frank explored new ways of linking his photographs, conceptually, formally, thematically, and emotionally. In little more than a decade of feverish creativity, Robert Frank broke the rules of documentary photography and reset the template for postwar Americans who … © Robert Frank, from, (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert Frank Collection, Robert B. Menschel Fund, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art. But to be an influence, one must not just be strong, but also a rebel. The book, which boasted an introduction by Jack Kerouac, was not initially well-received; the magazine Popular Photography, for instance, called it a “a wart-covered picture of America by a joyless man,” according to Marton. To be an influence is a heavy load. His lot was to do the work that would inspire and call to arms those willing to go forward into battle with a clear sense of what it takes to stand your visual ground with the photographs that were painfully truthful. The application was successful, allowing Frank to embark on the trailblazing journey that would lead to The Americans. “Americans at the time had seen themselves through the popular media, Life, Look magazine and other illustrated magazines of the period,” says Greenough. The photographs taken by Robert Capa – before he went on to co-found Magnum – and his partner Gerda Taro captured the brutal realities of combat. He rarely spoke to his subjects, but possessed an uncanny ability to capture the alienation, poverty and racism that rippled throughout his adopted homeland. Except for a few of the images, I found myself questioning why some of them were even published. In libraries and schools. Again, I turned to Robert Frank’s work. The most sensitive eye. He traveled the world before he finally settled in New York in 1947. They slide unconsciously to the left, alone and vulnerable. I am me — or rather, we are us — because of your crooked-impressionistic-out-of-focus-rule-breaking vision. A war photographer who hated war, Capa has been quoted to have said, ‘the war photographer’s most fervent wish is for unemployment’. Joseph Rodriguez was a New York City cabdriver for 10 years. The camera’s eye is always pointed outward, but Frank’s vision encompassed his inner world — and his inner demons. I made this photograph back in 1984 when I was on my way back home from work as a taxi driver. In 1947, according to David Henry of, , he sailed to New York and began working as a fashion photographer for, (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert Frank Collection, Purchased as a Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art. And this is what you make? Frank was also driven to create a publication that would work as a self-contained book. By the second and third decades of the 20th century, however, in the hands of such cameramen as Billy Bitzer (working with director D.W. Griffith) the camera was doing close-ups, shooting from moving vehicles, employing backlighting and other … “It encouraged a new generation of photographers to literally take road trips in homage, to try to do what Frank did,” Greenough says. I turned to “The Americans” to look for comfort and inspiration. “We must as a society come to terms with them.”, Continue © Robert Frank, from, (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert Frank Collection, The Robert and Anne Bass Fund. An immigrant. 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