He was considered one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century: Robert Frank is dead. Frank died on Monday at the age of 94 years in the Canadian city Inverness, reports the "New York Times", citing his gallery in New York. The award-winning Frank was married twice and had two children.
Born in Zurich in 1924, Frank came to the USA as a young man and photographed people in a completely new way during his travels through the country: spontaneous, undisguised, black and white, documentary. His resulting photo book "The Americans" became a classic, Frank revolutionized the aesthetics of post-war photography: Oblique attitudes, truncated figures and motion blur were a previously unprecedented style.
Kathy Willens / AP
Robert Frank had his own view
For this series, Robert Frank had covered between the American East and West Coast and made nearly 30,000 shots. 83 of them made it into the publication, for which Jack Kerouac wrote an introduction in 1959, a "mixture of diary, social portrait and road movie", as formulated by the Berlin exhibition house C / O Berlin.
photo gallery
8 pictures
Photo gallery: classic by Robert FrankFor Frank's death coincides with a new retrospective, which opens there on September 13th. The exhibition "Unseen" shows his Swiss time, traveling through Europe, unpublished photos from the USA and classics from "The Americans" - as contact sheets, in first editions and vintage prints from the early work.
From the sixties Robert Frank also made films that he produced independently and without budget, so that some consider him the inventor of independent film. The Rolling Stones commissioned him with a documentary about a tour, but here too Robert Frank kept his own point of view: he showed the Stones not only in the drug rush and tour stress, but also decadent, loathsome and not very glamorous. The resulting film "Cocksucker Blues" did not appeal to the band members, he was allowed to be shown only a few times.
