Rangefinder Magazine
June 2005

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Robert Frank: London/Wales by Judith Bell
Life Before “The Americans”

“London (English Bankers),” 1952, gelatin silver print; collection of the artist.

Hank Aaron will always be remembered for the hit that broke Babe Ruth’s record. Photographer Robert Frank suffers a similar fate. In 1958 he published The Americans, a portrait of America discovered in its filling stations, roadside bars and highways. In these raw, grainy images, he captured a sense of loneliness, isolation, and angst at odds with America’s myth of postwar prosperity. The images’ dark fermenting restlessness presaged the social and cultural upheaval to come and awakened a generation of photographers—Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, among others—to the possibilities of the camera as the all-seeing eye. The Americans had become, quite simply and undeniably, the most important and influential book of photographs produced since World War II.

	“London,” 1951–52, gelatin silver print; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist.

Genius, at the point it is recognized and embraced by the public at large, is often assumed to have emerged whole from nothingness. But what of the years leading up to the miracle of The Americans and Frank’s explosion onto the photographic stage?

“Robert Frank: London/Wales,” a 2003 exhibition organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., presented two distinct body of works that presage the artist’s interest in social commentary and the narrative potential in photographic sequencing that would define The Americans.

“Contrasting opposing themes such as money/work, rich/poor, and city/country in the London and Wales projects helps us see the transformation of Frank’s style from an innovative kind of idealism to a highly charged, metaphorical realism,” says Philip Brookman, Corcoran senior curator of photography and media arts. The 90 black-and-white photographs tell a timeless story of cities, people and institutions in transition through emotional evocative images that reveal Frank’s desire to forge a new way of seeing. “Concentrate,” Frank wrote while at work on these images. “How to follow the miners/bankers into another time and place. And from there, to a break from the traditional, to the confusing business of leaving values behind, because I’m trying to forget easy photo, trying to make something coming from within.—Time moves on and never stops or waits.”

	“Welsh Miners,” 1953, gelatin silver print; courtesy of Betsy K. Karel.

Described by Jack Kerouac as “the poet of the camera,” Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland, to a middle-class family in 1924. He left Switzerland for the United States on a steamer bound for New York in 1947. Twenty-two years old with five years of photography experience, he was eager to escape the insularity of Switzerland. Titled Forty Fotos, the 9x7-inch, bound book he brought with him to show Alexey Brodovitch, the designer and art director of Harper’s Bazaar, was a mélange of studies of such diverse subjects as lace, the Swiss landscape, portraits, radio tubes and public gatherings. Designed to show prospective clients Frank’s ability to work with a variety of subjects, the book landed him a job at Harper’s.

Although he quickly achieved success at Harper’s, Frank found neither his work nor the Brodovitch community satisfying or conducive. Brodovitch himself, however, did count among the photographers that impressed Frank during this period, a group that included Bill Brandt and André Kertész. In Brodovitch’s Ballet, a photographic study of the Ballets Russes, published in 1945, Frank observed the unfocused studies, random compositions, blurred movement and an intuitive ordering of images that would later play into his own artistic expression.

“Wales, Ben James,” 1953, gelatin silver print; collection of Shashi Caudill and Alan Cravitz.

As it would throughout Frank’s career, the security his job at Harper’s brought him began to chafe. He traveled to South America, wandering the continent for months, making images with what he called the freedom of an “action painter.” He later said: “I realized that security didn’t matter. I could never have the security I had in Switzerland, so there was no reason for me to attempt to get into the high-fashion world. I went to Peru to satisfy my own nature, to be free to work for myself.”

It was in South America that Frank began working with a 35mm Leica, as Brodovitch had recommended, which proved critical to the development of his style. The books Frank made from this body of work, one for Brodovitch and one for his mother, show an interest in the way one image relates to the next—how through juxtaposition, photographs empower one another. For example, a group of people walking on a day-lit street is contrasted with a crowd of people at night; a group of children seen from a distance is paired with a close-up of three boys.

	“London,” 1952–53, gelatin silver print; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Robert Frank Collection, gift of Robert Frank, 1990

“If you work on your own,” he said, “you break the rules, because you are the rules.” In the years that followed, ones he later described as a training camp, Frank continued his experimentation and wanderings, traveling to France, Spain, Wales and England.

In late 1951 and 1952, Frank photographed London bankers walking the streets of the financial district. Following these British financiers, dressed in traditional top hats and long coats, emblems of the former empire, he created images that depict a poetic dance between the walking figures and their fog-shrouded environment. In image after image they seem the only thing real in an environment that seems to belong to a dead past.

“Caerau, Wales,” 1953, gelatin silver print; collection of the artist

Intent on capturing the spirit of London in the aftermath of World War II, Frank also turned his lens on the city’s workers, including men delivering coal, children playing on the streets, people relaxing in the parks, and images of poverty throughout the city. In one image a workman at the left side of the frame struggles to offload a bag of coal from a truck overflowing with bags while to his right, a stream of bankers pass by, parallel worlds defined visually by the edge of the curb that separates them. In “London, Belsize Crescent, 1952/1953,” an unattended hearse, its back door ajar, frames a near-deserted fog-filled street. The child running into the distance and the man pushing a cart on the other side of the street dissolve into immateriality before its dark and certain presence.

In March 1953, before the impending nationalization of the country’s coal mines, Frank traveled to Caerau, Wales, to photograph coal miners whose lives centered around their work. In capturing the story Frank focused on one miner, Ben James, and his family. The intimacies shared in that close environment seeded coming recording of the violated privacies that define The Americans. In his image of James and three other miners emerging from the pit, faces blackened, the whites of their eyes seem to peer into us with a terrifying sense of knowing about a life we will gratefully never know. In another, a shirtless Ben James kneels bathing at a steel tub while his wife looks on reading the paper. “It was a departure for me: getting to know somebody and photograph them,” Frank has said. “Later photographing across America, I didn’t feel so good. You take away something when you photograph people and don’t ask their permission.”

	“London,” 1952–53, gelatin silver print; Whitney Museum of Art, New York

“Many of the images of the British Bankers show the figures from behind or with faces obscured, creating archetypal images of wealth and power rather than portraits,” notes Brookman. “But in Wales Frank created emphatic, layered portraits of the miners.” It is this emotional complexity that set a precedent for Frank’s later work. In 1951 when he was named winner of Life magazine’s Young Photographer’s Contest, Frank said, “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” That is the sure gift of a Robert Frank image and the essence of the London/Wales work: that poetic ability to capture the core that defines each of us and present it for the knowing.

Judith Bell is an art historian and critic based in Richmond, VA. Her work has appeared in American Photo, Art & Antiques, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and Elle, among others.