SALZBURG.- On close to 400 square meters in the Rupertinum, the The Museum der Moderne Salzburg presents photos, books and films by Robert Frank (1924 Zurich, CH–New York City, NY, US, and Nova Scotia, CAN). The artist is regarded as the pioneer of street photography and became famous for his volume of photographs The Americans, featuring snapshots of everyday life in the USA. Born in Switzerland, Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, where he initially worked as an assignment photographer in the field of fashion and advertising and as a photojournalist for magazines. In 1955 and 1956, he travelled through the United States on a Guggenheim grant, resulting in the photobook The Americans, which was published in 1959 with a foreword by Jack Kerouac and went on to become a milestone in the history of photography.

The exhibition Robert Frank: Books and Films, 1947–2016 was conceived by the artist and his publisher Gerhard Steidl. It is Frank’s explicit wish to make his photographs, which are still traded in the art market, accessible for all. The photos are displayed as acrylic inkjet prints on up to four-meter long sheet of newsprint which are installed without frames, directly onto the wall. The prints will be destroyed after the exhibition. “Quick, cheap and dirty,” as Frank calls it. “The exhibition presents rare pictures that as prints can hardly leave the storages of museums anymore. The direct presentation allows visitors to view the prints from up close. We thus continue to pursue the path of barrier-free access to modern and contemporary art, as with the recently opened Generali Foundation Study Center in the Rupertinum,” says Sabine Breitwieser, the Director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. “Works needn’t always be expensively and elaborately framed, it doesn’t always have to be vintage prints and originals, one can also do things in an experimental way. Robert Frank’s oeuvre not only patiently endures this, but seems to feel especially well with this form of presentation,” the publisher and guest curator of the show, Gerhard Steidl, points out.

Robert Frank observes people, places and things with the camera. His seemingly casual compositions in The Americans take a look behind the scenes of the American dream in the postwar period, employing a subjecttive, narrative image language that became style-forming. The curator of the exhibition, Christiane Kuhlmann, sums it up as follows: “Frank brings the viewer in close proximity to what appears alien. A closeness, however, that never dissolves to familiarity, but instead allows one to sense distances. At the time and today, as well, this has an overwhelming power from which one cannot escape.”

At the end of the 1950s, Frank gave up photography for more than a decade and turned to film. He shot independent movies navigating between fiction, documentation and autobiography. His carefully restored and newly digitized filmic oeuvre is a further highlight of the presentation. In a movie theater within the exhibition, 16 films and videos are screened that Frank produced between 1959 and 2008, including his first film Pull My Daisy (1959), Me and My Brother (1969) and This Song for Jack (1983). All three give inside views of the so-called Beat Generation around Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg. Also on view are his more recent films True Story (2004/2008), an autobiographical reflection, and Tunnel (2008), a commissioned film about the construction work on the Swiss Lötschberg-Tunnel.