Robert Frank and the filmic photograph

Abstract

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Robert Frank went back and forth between America and Europe, and between commercial and personal photography. Trained as a commercial and film-still photographer in Switzerland in the early 1940s, he enjoyed rapid success soon after arriving, in 1947, in New York, where he found work as a fashion photographer at Harper's Bazaar. But by the late 1940s, it had become clear that Frank's bent was poetic and personal, and that his work would always struggle to fit in to the depersonalized worlds of commerce and journalism. There was always a mood of personal interpretation, of idiosyncratic reaction and acerbic judgement, in Frank's work.