Two weeks ago I went to New York City to see Looking In: Robert Frank's 'The Americans'* photography show at the Metropolitan Museum or Art.
The show was organized by the National Art Gallery in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first American publication of the book 'The Americans'.
The collection of 83 photographs grew out of Robert Frank's cross-country travel on the Guggenheim Memorial fellowship in 1955-56. Frank, a young Swiss photographer, had come to the states a few years prior to that. This cross-country trip was to change his life forever, and also alter the way that street photography was done and viewed in the United States. Frank took about 27,000 candid photographs during the trip, shot on the streets, at bars, malls, factories... He eventually narrowed them down to 83, all of which were part of the show. There were also scores of marked contact sheets, work prints, letters, and work not included in 'The Americans' - an amazing display of Frank's work process! I could have spent days, not hours there.. It felt like being in the middle of an archaeological dig. A dig that is also very contemporary and very much alive.
The Americans didn't take "The Americans" very kindly when the collection first saw the light in 1958. It was harshly criticized, both by the public, and the art critics, and even by other photographers, not just for its subject matter but also for the quality of the photographs (the "blur", and the "grain", which went against ..the grain of the contemporary style), and was refused showing by such reputable museums as MOMA. It took almost 5 decades (!) to bring the show to New York City.
And boy, is it worth seeing! I caught it only a day before it closed, on the first weekend of January. It took my breath away (and not because I was literally sandwiched in among thousands of other visitors!)! I wasn't familiar with most of the work I saw there beforehand. (I had never, until then, seen the book) The work was fresh, blunt, honest, poignant. Robert Frank captures moments in-between (the events), moments between the "decisive moments" (Cartier-Bresson). His pictures don't freeze time. They make it last. If you look at his images long enough you start seeing the movement, the thought. Black and white, they are actually full of color. Often static, they convey motion and life. Stay long enough with his photograph, and you will hear the rhythm of your own heart beat. A show like this warrants multiple viewings. I only hope I don't have to wait 50 years for the next opportunity!
The day I was there, the museum was overflowing with people, Americans and foreigners alike... It seemed that the entire population had con-densed itself in, to catch the last glimpse of this once sidelined and controversial show. There was no room, between shoulders of the strangers, not even between the onlookers and the photographs themselves. What a contrast then, with some of the photographs, often featuring a single figure, or a face, or void of people altogether.
US 285, New Mexico, 1955. Photograph © Robert Frank
MET-MADness - a couple of shots of the holiday crowd in the lobby of the museum. Saturday, January 2nd 2010
My impressions from the exhibit spilled out of the museum and haunted me as I was walking down the frozen and suddenly vacant streets of Manhattan later in the day. And they also followed me underground...
A girl on a subway..
Some of the balloons, long and twisted in shape, resembled huge floating ventilation ducts threatening to burst out of the train car. The whole scene was reminiscent of a bizarre phantasmagoric film set, a surreal mixture between 'Brazil' and 'Bladerunner'.
Not surprising then, that mesmerized, my friend who was visiting NYC for the first time, and I got lost in the subway tunnels. We found ourselves at the World Trade Center station. Before looking for the way back to our car, we emerged from underground, and watched, from above the immense underground void, dotted with the remains of the buildings and infrastructure at Ground Zero. It was Saturday night. But the gigantic pit, its tall punctured walls resembling ancient Roman ruins in their monumentality and stillness, was nevertheless rambling, growling and trembling:
the National September 11 Memorial & Museum are under construction.
An abandoned broken umbrella flying around in a dance with the wind brings back the sense of scale, and returns me to reality..
...The fleeting sense of which is then winked at by a glowing apparition, through a tall storefront window, of a seductively orange Lamborghini! It is perfect in its smoothness and shine, but eery and unreal with its caged-in stillness and out-of-reachedness, but mostly for the contrast it slips in, with my earlier impressions.
