Robert Frank

Robert Frank was born, wealthy and Jewish, in 1924, in Zurich. He made his way to the USA in 1947, where Alexei Brodovitch of Harper’s Bazaar, took him on as a fashion photographer. But it wasn’t for Frank.as his felt there was no real spirit to the work. Instead, he went to Peru, Paris, London, Spain and Wales, taking photographs as he travelled. He constructed home-made books of his pictures. In 1955, encouraged by Walker Evans – the photographic chronicler of the rural American Depression – he applied for a Guggenheim scholarship to make and photograph a journey across the United States.

He spent two years looking for things that, he said, were easily found but not easily selected and interpreted. He drove some 10,000 miles across the US, often with his wife and two small children. He used at least 760 rolls of film, mostly Kodak Tri-X – which had come on the market only six months earlier. He took 28,000 photographs.
In 1958, he published The Americans, a distillation of his journey. The book made his name and reputation. It contained just 83 photographs, each on its own right-hand page, with captions at the back of the book. He photographed bars, drive-ins, elevators, crucifixes, offices, factories, department stores and coffee shops, political conventions, urinals, cemeteries, roads.

The car window as framing device is perhaps his most distinctive formal innovation. A lot of images are lopsided, taken in low light, with intentional blur and fuzziness, they are in complete contrast to other contemporary photographers, such as Irving Penn.
The work did not appeal to many who thought it a degradation of the nation (Aperture Magazine) but in time, most people saw it as non-judgemental and realistic: a view of modern American.

After the book was published, Frank practically gave up photography and went on to make movies and documentaries and experimented with Polariod but he never achieved the reputation for greatness that his photography had bought him.

http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/382