VIENNA.- Robert Frank, one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century’s postwar years, revolutionized classic reportage and street photography. Over a period spanning six decades, this Swiss-American artist created photographs, experimental montages, books, and films. The Albertina is showing selected works and series that trace Robert Frank’s development: from his early photojournalistic images created on trips through Europe to the pioneering work group The Americans and on to his later, more introspective projects, over 100 works serve to illuminate central aspects of his oeuvre, which has never before seen presentation in Austria.

Dynamism and Contrasts
Born in Zurich in 1924 to a German-Jewish family, Robert Frank was granted Swiss citizenship only just before the end of the Second World War. He began his training as a photographer in 1941 and received thorough schooling in the profession’s tools and techniques. The motifs of his initial documentary pictures, which were devoted to national identity as symbolized by parades and flags, proved to be ones that he would return to later in his career. Upon his emigration from Switzerland to the USA in 1947, the artist established an expressive pictorial language that broke with that era’s photographic conventions, which were defined in terms of refined composition and perfect tonal values. At the suggestion of Alexey Brodovitch, art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Frank began using a 35 mm Leica that enabled him to adopt an intuitive and spontaneous way of working. The result was a new pictorial language characterized by strong contrasts, dynamism, and blurry images. He went on to produce work groups such as People You Don’t See (1951), in which he devoted himself to the everyday lives of six individuals from his Manhattan apartment complex. A reportage on London (1951–1953) characterizes this metropolis by way of the contrast between wealthy bankers and people from the lower classes, and Great Britain was also the setting of his series on the hard daily life of Welsh miner Ben James (1953). By way of contrast, Frank’s photographs from Paris (1949–1952) feature a more lyrical tone.

Thanks to his intuitive approach to photography, Frank’s works lend expression to a decidedly subjective gaze featuring a personal take on what he experienced and saw.

The Americans
Robert Frank’s artist book The Americans , comprised of photos shot between 1955 and 1957, made photographic history: captured on a series of road trips through the United States, these images expose the postwar “American way of life” in grim black and white, revealing a reality of pervasive racism, violence, and consumerism. Due to these photos’ failure to uphold America’s self-image at the time, he at first only managed to have this book published in Europe.

Frank’s coming of age as an artist went hand-in-hand with that of jazz, beat literature, and the improvisatory style of abstract expressionism—and his own expressivity is of a raw, improvised, and spontaneous character. Jack Kerouac extolls Frank’s gaze in the foreword to the book’s US edition with the following words: “The humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHINGness and American-ness of these pictures!” It was these qualities that underpinned Robert Frank’s success in creating one of the most influential photographic works of the postwar period, one that effected a sustained renewal of street photography. Announced by Frank as the “visual study of a civilization,” The Americans contained motifs that, in the midst of the Cold War, had not yet been deemed worthy of depiction. He was interested in everyday phenomena of leisure and pop culture, but also documented isolation, the plights of minorities, and racism: the photograph Trolley, New Orleans was taken just a few weeks before the African-American activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama to a white passenger.

It was among 27,000 negatives from 767 rolls of film that Frank chose his best pictures. The contact sheets and working prints from this project make clear how systematically he proceeded in creating his images, and they also allow one to reconstruct the processes by which he shot and selected them. Around half of his eighty final works can be seen in the present exhibition.

Touching Montages
With his 1958 photo series From the Bus, which contains photos of passers-by casually taken from a moving bus, Frank set off in a new, more experimental direction. And eventually, in no small part due to his dissatisfaction with the limited possibilities of individual pictures, he abandoned photography and turned to film. There, Frank often used his own photographs in order to examine his memories and past, producing several autobiographical filmic essays. Upon his return to photography at the beginning of the 1970s, the form and content of his works changed yet again: autobiographical themes such as the tragic loss of his children are visualized via multi-image montages and sequences that frequently also contain texts. In these, Frank succeeded in poetically amalgamating different media and their influences upon one another.