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Robert Frank
Robert Frank: London/Wales duotone photographs by Robert Frank,
Introduction by Philip Brookman (Scalo) "War is over; the heroic
French population reaffirms superiority. Love, Paris, and Flowers
... but London was black, white, and gray, the elegance, the style,
all present in front of always changing fog. Then I met a man from
Wales talking about the Miners and I had read How Green Was My
Valley. This became my only try to make a `Story. "'-Robert Frank,
letter to the author, May 29, 2002
This is a war story of a different kind, of the aftermath. It's
nineteen fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three, when coal was still
hauled down the mountain railway to heat the cities and fuel the
fires of a postwar industrial economy. The skies are solid gray from
fog and smoke; a miner returns home from work underground as a
banker emerges from the dense snowy air, walking the street with
agility and purpose. The British bankers and miners lead obverse
lives, facing each other across these pages, but treading very
different paths. Who are these people of the London streets and
Welsh valleys, the financiers and colliery workers? What is their
relationship to the past and to each other? Robert Frank's images
locate them in the context of their environment, and in doing this
he suggests a social narrative that connects these people of the
city and the country to their money and work in 1950s Britain.
In London, the bankers seem pensive, preoccupied, and anxious.
They are always moving to or from their workplaces and always
looking away from the camera. Frank portrays them as very elegant
figures whose clothes show off their position in society. But he
doesn't know their names or anything about their lives. They seem
mechanical and locked into place by the sidewalks, crosswalks, and
streets that channel their movements, as if they were on tracks.
They glide through the fog and appear alienated as they intersect
with people of a different social class. The bankers exist in a
separate world and move through discrete spaces with few
connections to any other workers. There is a weight to their
traditions that keeps them apart. But the life of the street itself
begins to come into focus as the chauffeurs, deliverymen, beggars,
and mothers pushing prams catch the photographer's attention. These
people seem at home in their city, solitary but at peace. On one
level Frank's view of London is a pessimistic portrayal of
individuals alone with their destiny, an existential vision emerging
from the bad dreams of history. But his despairing outlook is
tempered by the genuine hope he discovers in the faces of the
children.
Unlike London, Wales at the time was an outpost, an industrial
region isolated from Britain's financial center, with a different
language and culture. Most of the people in these pictures lived
there all their lives. The village of Caerau, in Glamorgan, South
Wales, was built around the Caerau Colliery,
which opened in 1889 to produce steam coal. In 1945 the mine
employed 586 men, down from 1,839 in 1918. It finally closed in
1979. Arriving in Caerau in the late winter light of March 1953,
Frank chose to focus his attention on one man, 53-year-old Ben
James, who had been a miner since he was 14. His wife's father had
died in the same coal pit in which James spent his days 1,200 feet
underground, shoring roof beams with timbers. Caerau was a
close-knit community, bound by a traditional way of life and
working-class values. Many people there lived in austere conditions.
James, for example, did not have running water inside his home. Yet
as Frank grew close to the miners and their families, his
photographs took in the full scope of their lives, warming as he
moved beyond doumentary conventions to express a personal point of
view.
"Concentrate. How to follow the MINERS BANKERS into another time
and place. And from there, to a break from the Traditional, to the
confusing business of leaving values behind, because I'm trying to
forget easy photo, trying to make something coming from within ...
Time moves on and never stops or waits. "-Robert Frank, letter to
the author, March 26, 2002
For more than fifty years, Robert Frank has repeatedly broken the
rules of photography and filmmaking to expand their expressive
potential. Best known for his seminal book The Americans, first
published in 1958, and his experimental, elegiac film Pull My
Daisy, made in 1959, he has pioneered a revolutionary approach to
photography and filmmaking that combines autobiography, poetry, and
emotion with the logic of gritty realism. The Americans was like a
mirror reflecting 1950s America through European eyes. His
revelation that the best way to tell a story was searching,
imperfect, and free of rhetoric became a model for future artists
struggling to understand the ambiguities of society.
Frank's creative voice, which came to fruition with The
Americans, had evolved through years of experimentation and
practice. The Swiss-born photographer immigrated to the United
States in 1947, and his art was transformed by this experience. He
worked on fashion and editorial project; but his goal was to become
independent, an artist able to pursue his own vision without relying
on the picture magazines for work. Between 1949 and 1953, before he
photographed The Americans, Frank traveled back to Europe twice, on
extended trips to France, Switzerland, Great Britain, Spain, and
Italy. During this time he developed an increasingly unique style
from his ongoing interest in both European and American aesthetic
and philosophical traditions. In 1949 and 1950 he worked primarily
in Paris. These images show chairs, animals, signs, and
flowers-lonesome, romantic places pre sented as visual impressions
rather than a structured story. On his second return to Europe from
late 1951 to early 1953, Frank began to work toward more extended
and revealing narrative sequences featuring bankers, flowers,
bullfighters, and coalminers. These efforts, especially in London
and Wales, helped to spark a new maturity in his work.
In the winter of 1951-52, Frank visited London accompanied by his
wife Mary-her family was British-and their young son Pablo, who was
born in February 1951. He set out to photograph the atmosphere of
the place: the light, the fog, and the otherworldly feel of the
financial district known as the City of London. "In a sense, all
pictures exist because of their atmosphere," he later declared in
the September 1954 issue of U.S. Camera. He followed bankers dressed
in traditional top hats and long coats, emblems of the former
empire. He paradoxically pictured their movements as a kind of
formal dance through the miasma. He also photographed laborers,
street musicians, markets, dogs, children playing, and people
waiting in queues and riding buses. While in London, Frank visited
photographer Bill Brandt, whose edgy documentary work he truly
admired. In his books, The English at Home (1936) and A Night in
London (1938), Brandt explored the differences between social
classes in Britain and the visual mood of London before the war. In
addition, he had photographed British coal miners at work during the
Depression. Also informed by Brassai's Paris By Night (1933) and
Andre Kertesz's Day of Paris (1945), Frank at one point imagined his
own project as a diary of daily life. His proof sheets were
sometimes labeled with words like "night" or "afternoon" to
categorize the different types of images he was making. He depicted
London in all kinds of weather but he loved the fog best, as it
softened and reduced the contrast between light and dark to an
almost even level. He worked intuitively, only in natural light, and
never used a flash or light meter. He peered into the shadows where
hidden details were often absorbed and ordinarily would remain
unnoticed. One image shows a deliveryman standing in the gutter,
straining under the weight of a huge coal sack as a banker
resolutely strides down the sidewalk, umbrella cocked in his hand.
This photograph is split vertically, almost in half; the stark
divide he witnessed between two classes of British society is drawn
right down the middle.
Frank was already looking beyond the traditional photo-essay form
for a more experimental rendering of his experience. He left London
for Spain in March 1952. In June he wrote from Valencia to Life
photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, who had also photographed miners in
Wales: "By the little experience I had with Life I can understand
how you must feel working with and for them for so long," Frank
said. "The only question for me would be how long do I need to stay
with them." Back in Zurich in October, working with Swiss graphic
designer Werner Zryd, he constructed three copies of a handmade book
of photographs. Titled Black White and Things, it was his most
ambitious and challenging sequence of images to date. The pictures
are organized in three distinct sections: "Somber people and black
events, quiet people and peaceful places, and the things people have
come in contact with." The pictures are structured in a way that
suggests emblematic, conceptual ideas. Photographed in various
locations in the United States, Peru, and Europe from 1948 to 1952,
they relate in a visual, sequential, and metaphorical manner. They
do not order the world as a narrative or travelogue but illuminate
its lyrical connections through movement in solemn, rich tones of
black and white. The opening sequence depicts a marching band, a
funeral procession, and a group of London bankers hurrying off to
work. This progression of images launches the book into an
elliptical arc that confers meaning to the relationships between
people, objects, places, and the empty spaces in between. Black
White and Things signaled a significant point of departure in
Frank's work.
Almost a year after leaving London for the mainland, Frank
returned and traveled twice to the southwestern Welsh mining towns
of Maesteg and Caerau. Mary and Pablo joined him in Caerau before
they left together on March 16 for Southampton and the ocean voyage
back to New York. Inspired by Richard Llewelyn's poignant 1939 novel
How Green Was My Valley, Frank sought an isolated community with
complex cultural traditions and a history of self-determination-all
elements of a Great Story. Spanning the early years of the century,
this sprawling tale is narrated by Huw Morgan, a child who grows up
to witness vast changes in the beloved valley where his family had
lived and worked for generations. As conditions worsened, Huw's
close-knit family split apart in the face of union conflict, company
exploitation, and bitter strikes. A growing mountain of slag
pollutes the beautiful landscape, literally burying his childhood
memories.
Frank photographed Caerau during another transitional time in the
lives of the miners. He arrived only six years after the country's
coalmines had been nationalized in January 1947. To rebuild the
economy after the Second World War, the government worked to renew
peacetime productivity and put people back to work throughout the
country by taking`over many key industries. Mines were modernized,
production boosted, aging pits were closed, and working conditions
slowly improved. For example, soon after Frank's pictures were made,
showers were installed at the mine where Ben James worked, allowing
him to wash before returning home. Guided up the Llynfi Valley by a
representative of the British Coal Board, Frank found a
community-like the one in Llewellyn's novelwhere people's lives
still revolved around work, family, and tradition. This was the
first time he had photographed so extensively in a working-class
environment. With permission from the Coal Board and from the
working men themselves, he was allowed to follow the miners from
home into the pits, on the buses, to the pay window, into their
clubs, and home again, tracking their daily lives. He set out to
create a picture story about James and his family that could be
organized, like his London images, as a day in a miner's life. On
the back of one of his proof sheets Frank wrote an outline to plan
the story:
1. Breakfast 5. Lunch
underground 9. Washing up
2. Walking to work
6. Work underground 10. Pools
3. In canteen 7. Waiting to
come 11. Dinner 4
PM
4. In the cage 8n Walking
home-payday
12. Club
Frank's photographs of Ben James were first published with
descriptive captions in the 1955
issue of U.S. Camera Annual. There he confessed, "I could have
followed a livelier and perhaps
more colorful Welsh miner but I'm happy I decided to portray Ben
James. When I said farewell to him I realized that no future story
on any Welsh miner will look as this one does. I'm sure the new
generation is essentially the same but I wonder if not having such
hardships will make it easier`for them." He understood that the
miners' lives were changing and their culture would soon change,
too. He set out to document their lives during this transition but
ended up showing their humanity from within. At the beginning of his
portfolio on Caerau, the magazine editorialized: "In his story Frank
has combined his intellectual insights with a poetic sense of the
revealing moment." In retrospect, looking back at the negatives,
proof sheets, work prints, and finished pictures, these images
disclose a more critical narrative, one that defies the
journalistic, photographic "moment" in favor of a more provocative
form.
Like his symbolic, musical sequencing of images in Black White
and Things, Frank's Welsh miner story subverts the accepted notion
that documentary photographs should dispassionately bear witness or
disclose narrative truth. Although he set out to construct a
photo-essay that might be published in Life, his pictures of Wales
often look like informal, revealing glances rather than
photojournalistic documents of events or a series of anecdotal
moments in time. The pictures do not fit together like a story,
with a beginning, middle, and end. They express more emotion and ask
questions about people's inner lives and their environment, unlike
much of the work that picture magazines were publishing at the time.
Frank's photographs are more attuned to the passing of time. They
depict expository, symbolic moments as informal but universal
encounters rather than as single images that could unlock an entire
narrative. They are not composed to tell us how to think but to
convey the feeling and psychology of a miner's life through
movement, light, tone, and atmosphere. In this regard they connect
to much of Frank's work in London. His evolving style evokes the
character of everyday life in an open way that leaves many details
of the narrative up to the imagination. In effect, these photographs
broke all the rules.
Comparing Frank's pictures from London and Wales, we discover
focused juxtapositions of opposites: money and work, rich and poor,
stagnation and change, alienation and redemption. He rendered a
unique tension between these opposing groups of images, referencing
the geopolitical differences and social polarization within Britain
at that time. Between London and Wales, he forged a more complex
story than he had previously told, one that is truly subjective in
form. It brings together his personal views on these different
societies instead of summarizing journalistic facts about them. Each
project informs the other to offer a broader, more nuanced view of
social conditions in relation to his subjects' interior lives.
Together, the images in London/Wales add up to something more,
approaching an authenticity that is not evident in the fragments of
the separate stories.
In many ways, though, Frank's London pictures are visually very
different from those he made in Wales. His depictions of London are,
for the most part, salient, elegant constructions, per-
haps his most artful. The bankers are distant. The gray skies and
fog-filtered light make the space appear shallow, the people and
buildings flattened. There is no sense of graphic depth except that
implied by the perspectives of architecture and city-street lines;
most everything appears on the surface like a Cubist abstraction.
These pictures can often be divided into grids; in half, in thirds,
in quarters, bisected by angles, and so on, composed like much of
the very best Bauhaus-inspired European photography at that time.
Swiss photographers Jakob Tuggener, Paul Senn, Gotthard Schuh,
Walter Laubli, and Werner Bischof had each expressed a rigorously
composed documentary humanism in their work, which Frank knew well.
However, in Robert Frank's view of London, people seem to float in
space, creating a tension between the actual world and the world
that exists in their minds. The backgrounds of banks, pillars,
bridges, streets, and terraced houses are like cutouts, stage sets
for the people who drift through them. These are silent pictures;
cars, trucks, and buses go by but they are purely visual sensations,
their din seems dampened by the fog. Frank's goal was to simplify
his images, to downplay technique and eliminate extraneous details
from his work in favor of mood and meaning, one reason he loved to
photograph in the fog and low light. "The photographer must have an
attitude towards the things around him," he insisted.
Some of Frank's photographs of London edge towards the rougher,
more chaotic or expressionistic form of those he made in Wales.
Placed side-by-side, the transition in style that occurs between
these two projects becomes more evident; you can trace the change.
For example, a few of his nighttime city scenes are looser and more
relaxed, as if the dim light and lack of clear sight gave him
permission to experiment. A beggar plays a violin in virtual
darkness under a lamppost at Victoria Station; a shadowy, empty
industrial road resolves into a muted, spatial loneliness worthy of
painter Edward Hopper; a musician carries his bass up the steps from
a subterranean tube station into the hazy streetlight-nightlife of
the city. Frank clearly feels something for these people. He casts
his shadow into the night for a glimpse into their hearts.
Frank haunted London. In Wales he was a welcome participant. With
Mary and Pablo, he briefly stayed with a family in Caerau. Away from
the big city, in the Welsh countryside, his pictures are more open
and the grids dissolve. His images are freed from their Bauhaus
bars. There are hints of this pictorial freedom in some of his
earlier photographs from Peru (1948), Switzerland (1949), and Spain
(1952) where, as in Wales, he pursued more narrative projects
outside the cities. Yet his Welsh images seem to burst; the picture
elements are no longer composed so tightly in the frame, held in
tension by a grid-based structure. In one portrait of Ben James, his
coal black face and hands smear into their surroundings, connecting
with fragments of other figures, moving along with the rhythm of the
bouncing bus that takes them home from work. In another moody
picture, a sea of soft-focus eyes glistens behind the proud smudged
masks of miners, cresting like waves across the image. A boy sorting
coal leans easily into the sunlight streaming through clearstory
windows above
the railcars. His quizzical gaze seamlessly connects him and the
photographer to their surroundings. The mineworkers are often seen
in close-up, moving doggedly through their workdays in a way that
distorts traditional photographic structure. Their actions seem to
splash across the surface of Frank's prints as if flung from Jackson
Pollock's brush. Maybe this was the first time photography came
right up against Abstract Expressionist painting as an art of
physical participation. Frank's sentiment for the workers in Caerau
is very clear. His emotions are on the surface. The time-honored,
perspectivebound composition he had perfected in London was no
longer sufficient as his feelings propelled him actively into the
center of the miner's life, and helped shape that experience into
his art.
Between 1951 and 1953, while on the road from London to Wales and
home again to New York, Frank began to understand that a single
photograph could not adequately represent real life or document the
truth about something he had seen or felt. A photograph could be a
record, a testimony, or a fragmentary, symbolic statement, but a
single image could rarely summarize a moment in real time. One
picture could not really render his experience in the pits of
Caerau, express the lamplit dampness, smell, and fear of descending
deep within the earth to carry out the coal that burns the sky to
particulate darkness; or the exultant joy he felt in the music that
fills the town after the colliery whistle sounds its shift-ending
song.
On May 27, 1953, just over two months after Frank's return to the
United States from Wales, Edward Steichen's Postwar European
Photography exhibition opened at The Museum of Modern Art in New
York. Twenty-two photographs by Frank were shown, including fifteen
from London and Wales. His unframed, Masonite-mounted prints
appeared for the first time as expressive, moody, highly charged
works of art. These images of bankers, miners, and beggars were
grouped in rhythmic juxtapositions that filled one large wall
almost floor to ceiling. The dense compression, pairing of pictures,
and all-over-the-wall installation, gave an impression of
simultaneity that provoked concurrent and immediate connections
between these photographs, like the cuts between scenes of a film.
As if his trips to London and Wales were practice runs for the
marathon, within months, many of the same subjects would draw his
attention in America: bankers, laborers, people on the street and on
the bus, a mine, children, cemeteries, and the tension of money and
work, rich and poor. By refining his methods in Europe and thinking
about innovative ways to connect groups of images, the stage was set
for Frank's groundbreaking work on The Americans, photographed in a
style that was already emerging in his British pictures of the early
1950s.
"Have written a few lines under the photo of Friedhof Cimetiere
Resting place, all almost holy ... What a souvenir for old long gone
Ben James and these anonymous Workers, Bankers, Miners, Workers,
Wives, Bus Riders, and the now Grandmothers, Grandfathers, Boys and
Girls-a trip for me almost out of memory but standing still for NOW
and LATER. "-Robert Frank, letter to the author, December 5, 2002
Robert Frank's photographs of London and Wales document a small
corner of our history but they also set forth the struggle and
spirit that defines the character of a place and its people. His
expressive combination of chronicle and testament in this work
opens a doorway through which to view that spirit. Before leaving
Caerau, Frank made a formal family portrait of Ben James, his wife,
and their son, David, who was the first in his family to escape the
colliery-he was studying geology in the nearby city of Swansea. It
captures a transitional moment for the family. They are posed
together as a group in front of the window of their home, the
morning glow streaking across their faces from the side to
illuminate their close relationship. Dressed in his Sunday best,
David is beaming, standing tall with his arm resting easily on his
father's shoulder. Ben and his wife stare straight into the
camera-serious, still, and solid in the raking shaft of light that
carves his angular face from sun and shadow. They are clearly proud
of their son and his accomplishments--their legacy-yet quite unsure
of his future beyond the boundaries of their established way of
life.
In London/Wales, Frank's depiction of a cemetery in Maesteg
follows this endearing portrait, reinforcing his expression of loss
and transition. For the people of the valley, the graveyard
represents their collective history and memory, but for us it's
something more. The hinge on which the end of the book pivots, this
image breaks the narrative spell of the miner's life. An angel's
wings spread over a grave in a far corner of the cemetery with a
billboard in the background: "News of the World," it reads. With her
hand raised to her lips, the stone angel guards the insular,
generational silence of the community memorial, but news from the
outside intrudes even on this pastoral scene. The sign connects the
world of the miners to global culture and media from the city. Under
this picture Frank dedicates his work to the miners, bankers, and
children in his pictures. Recalling Jack Kerouac's inspired
soliloquy about all the holy sounds of time pouring through the
window, from their film Pull My Daisy, he writes, "... The angel of
silence has flown over their heads."
We return to London following Frank's reflective, voice-over
invocation. Wings appear again on the back of another tiny angel
holding a wreath that ornaments the hood of a hearse. The imposing
vehicle is seen from the front, its gleaming, polished grille and
headlamps staring back at the photographer like the face of a
mechanical banshee. This visual shift connects his memories of
In Frank's portrayal of
The final photographs in London/Wales, made on the streets and in
the stations of
How do these isolated children escape the bad dreams of the past?
How will they make the world anew, in their own image? Like all
children, they live as much in a land of make-believe-in which they
control their own destinies and carry their dreams in a bag-as they
live in the real world. Their struggle is to keep running. In these
final few redemptive frames, Robert Frank's work seems more
mysterious, more connected to the literature of life, inventing a
place where time moves on and never stops or waits.
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