CHRONOLOGY

One of the world’s most important living photographers, Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1924. As a young man, he emigrated to New York City in 1947 and worked as a photographer for the magazine Harper’s Bazaar. In 1948, he gave up the security of his job and for the next six years travelled extensively in Peru, Bolivia and throughout Europe. Focusing on the everyday lives of the people he encountered, the photographs that resulted demonstrate Frank’s early interest in combining realism with the poetic potential of photographic sequencing.

In 1958, Frank published his seminal photo-book The Americans, which tells the story of one man’s journey through a country. The pictures that he chose for the book were selected from a vast number of photographs and numerous rolls of film. The proof sheets on display include both published images and others taken along the way, placing his best-known pictures in the context of his travels. Presented in this exhibition as works of art in their own right, these proof sheets also point to another journey - Frank’s journey into the heart of his creative process.

Frank’s restless search for what he described as ‘a more sustained form of visual expression’, and his continuing quest for self-reinvention, led him to abandon photography soon after he finished work on The Americans, and to concentrate on making films. His pioneering approach to film-making combined autobiography, poetry, emotion and gritty realism.

Returning to photography in the 1970s, he made complex constructions, containing multiple prints in black-and-white and colour - some from earlier works - as well as stills from films and videos. The photo-montage shown here, Memory For the Children, 2001, includes the stencilled words 'Leaving Home' and 'Coming Home', suggesting a circular journey, repeated frequently and recalled in memory. Much of Frank’s work is concerned with memory. As images are shot then re-photographed, or filmed, repeated or reconsidered, Frank questions the traditional understanding of photography as the freezing of a moment in time, captured in a still image.