Robert Frank Redux:
Another look at the Films and Photography of Robert Frank (1924-2019).
Goldsmiths University – hosted by the English and Creative Writing Dept. Sept. 22nd – 2-5Pm. Small Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building. Attendance Free
With Robert Frank’s upcoming anniversary in 2024, the time is ripe for a re-appraisal of his immensely varied oeuvre. Taking Frank’s adage ‘I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside” as its starting point, this session on the Swiss/American photographer will re-examine the formal and emotional properties of Frank’s work and in the process trace his move from being the quintessential ‘outsider’ documentarian of America in the 1950s to his allegedly more ‘inward’ photography and film work from the 1960s onwards. The session will look both at his early iconic work The Americans (1958), the nature of iconicity within this work, and Frank’s later use of polaroids, films and video as a way to inscribe meaning into the frame through writing, fragmentation and other forms of articulation. Always mindful of the mnemonic potential of the camera, Frank’s willingness to establish an autobiographical contract between himself and the reader/viewer, epitomised how the documentary ethos took an experimental as well as lyrical turn in the post war era. Frank’s blurring of a private inner life and its public consumption was hugely influential was hugely influential on subsequent photographers and artists as was his continued desire to question both the limits and potential of the photographic medium, a search that is also traceable – as this session will chart, in the anti-cinematic, experimental nature of his films and videos and their continued influence on the American art scene.
Speakers and Papers:
