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Shot After Shot
John Haberin New York City
Robert Frank: Films, Collaborations, and Contact Sheets
How does a photographer capture the decisive moment? In the case of Robert Frank, by taking enough pictures.
The decisive contact sheet
A politician boasting of his presence and his art of manipulating a crowd, even as a face beneath him breaks down in tears? It took shot after shot for the man to raise his arms to their full extent and for the stone carving of a woman's head to emerge into the light. Those people in a trolley car? It took shot after shot for the trolley to reach that unsettling angle smack against the picture plane—and for the people to come out of the shadows to engage not each other, but rather the nation and the viewer.
When the Met exhibited The Americans in 2010, it showed Robert Frank's vision of diversity and discontent as his book developed over three trips across country and eighty-three photos. Yet it also included several outtakes, and it stressed that he ran through well over a hundred rolls of film and thousands of frames. Now a gallery exhibits thirty-three contact sheets, out of an incredible eighty-one in a box set. It insists, too, on their completeness and Frank's complicity. It describes how the set grew from a Japanese man's dedication. He and the photographer got along just great, you see, and reached full understanding, although neither knew a word of the other's language.
It sounds like a parody or a scam, in the interest of multiples for sale, but never mind. It hardly mentions the photographs themselves or Frank's working methods, but you can gain a fresh sense of them all the same. Maybe you imagined him waiting patiently for that decisive moment or even staging the scene, in what a museum has called "Time Management." Instead, you can see him choosing a subject and snapping away. You can feel his satisfaction in circling the frame that he wants in red—or showing his indecision with a question mark. Only rarely does he have to draw the circle closer, with every intent to crop the print later on to make it more decisive.
The Americans stands for a decisive moment in history as well. The very ideal of the decisive moment goes back to Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, to preserve its perfection once and for all. Frank came later, but also before the discontent with the past of the 1960s or the American crossings of "But Still, It Turns" today. He comes, too, between the documentary assurance of Walker Evans or Alfred Eisenstaedt and the anxiety of Diane Arbus on the dark side of New York City or Garry Winogrand on the dark side of a nation. As I wrote much better back in 2010, the Swiss photographer was after his own engagement with America. Even more than for Danny Lyon, photography here is both personal and political.
Frank seems determined to avoid the headlines, even while making people and politics inescapable. For all the turmoil, he is out for human contact and a record of human agency. On Flag Day, he goes for the flag on the walls of a building, but he finds that one shot in which people appear disturbingly cut off in the windows. At a Fourth of July picnic, he finds that shot in which people neither hang out aimlessly on the one hand nor march in lockstep on the other, but rather stride. At a campaign rally for Adlai Stevenson, he finds that shot with not a trace of a banner—to capture instead a lone person with a sign and a message. To subordinate his subjects to someone else's order just will not do, not even Stevenson's on the left.
Did he even know where he was going apart from them? I can imagine him either circling the print he always wanted or coming upon it with as much surprise as yours or mine today. He spots that one shot at a drive-in with a clear image of the screen and a competing point of artificial light, with people implicit in the darkness. He spots, too, a dark car at the vanishing point of a highway flooded with reflected light. Early critics saw people going nowhere, and they saw the slack faces and seemingly casual compositions as an affront to America or to art. Yet even the appearance of disorder required a decisive moment.
Robert Frank ran at Danziger through April 8, 2017. A related review looks again at Frank's "The Americans."