Robert Frank

<p>Robert Frank was born on November 9, 1924, in Zürich, Switzerland, to a Jewish family that spent World War II in safety within neutral Switzerland. After training in photography, he emigrated to New York City in 1947, working as a fashion photographer for <em>Harper's Bazaar</em> under art director Alexey Brodovitch before turning toward poetic street photography.</p><p>In 1955, with the support of Walker Evans, Frank became the first European photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. Over the next two years, he drove 10,000 miles across thirty states in an old Ford coupe, exposing 767 rolls of black-and-white film (over 27,000 frames). From this massive archive, Frank distilled exactly 83 photographs into <strong>The Americans</strong>, published first in Paris (1958) and then in the US (1959) with an introduction by Beat Generation icon Jack Kerouac.</p><p>Frank's grainy, off-kilter, melancholic imagery revealed an America of racial tension, consumer alienation, roadside diners, jukeboxes, and lonely highways that unsettled critics initially but became universally recognized as one of the most influential photobooks of the 20th century. Frank subsequently transitioned to experimental cinema, directing the seminal Beat film <em>Pull My Daisy</em> (1959) and the Rolling Stones documentary <em>Cocksucker Blues</em> (1972). He died in Nova Scotia in 2019 at age ninety-four.</p>