maandag, mei 12, 2003
Een interessant artikel over Robert Frank dat ik gisteren vond in The Baltimore Sun. Zijn boek The Americans is een standaardwerk dat in geen enkele (fotografie-)boekenkast zou mogen ontbreken.
Ten tijde van het verschijnen van het boek in 1955 was de kritiek niet mals. Frank toonde niet de zegeningen van het Amerikaanse "family life" maar de verscholen armoede die elders onderbelicht bleef:
Bruce Downes, editor of Popular Photography, denounced the pictures as "images of hate and hopelessness, of desolation and preoccupation with death. They are images of an America seen by a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption. ... Frank is also a liar, perversely basking in the kind of world and the kind of misery he is perpetually seeking and persistently creating. It is a world shrouded in an immense gray tragic boredom. This is Robert Frank's America. God help him."
Jack Kerouac beschreef Frank's werk in zijn voorwoord heel anders: That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in the tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness, and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.
foto Robert Frank
Ten tijde van het verschijnen van het boek in 1955 was de kritiek niet mals. Frank toonde niet de zegeningen van het Amerikaanse "family life" maar de verscholen armoede die elders onderbelicht bleef:
Bruce Downes, editor of Popular Photography, denounced the pictures as "images of hate and hopelessness, of desolation and preoccupation with death. They are images of an America seen by a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption. ... Frank is also a liar, perversely basking in the kind of world and the kind of misery he is perpetually seeking and persistently creating. It is a world shrouded in an immense gray tragic boredom. This is Robert Frank's America. God help him."
Jack Kerouac beschreef Frank's werk in zijn voorwoord heel anders: That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in the tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness, and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.
foto Robert Frank
# posted by Jan-Edward : 11:19
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