A Member’s Field Guide to Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue
Coinciding with the centennial of Robert Frank’s birth, the exhibition explores his restless experimentation across photography, film, and books. Delve into his groundbreaking career through words, images, and more.
Life Dances On borrows its title from Frank’s poignant 1980 film, in which his wife, the artist June Leaf, looks at the camera and asks Frank, “Why do you make these pictures?” In an introduction to the film’s screening, he answered: “Because I am alive.”
By 1970, when Frank moved to Mabou, Nova Scotia, he had begun making photographs that expressed a more personal, filmic sensibility. These works have no allegiance to any particular process, format, or method; they combine Polaroids, 35mm negatives, collage, photomontage, stenciling, handwriting, and scratching. The artist’s decision to reveal so much personal history—from the death of his daughter Andrea to his own hospitalization—seems to have required that these difficulties find a physical parallel in the finished objects. At heart, Frank’s work has never been about news or history, but rather the individual human experience.
