In 1947 Frank moved from his native Zurich to New York, where he found a new community with his fellow artists. While temporarily back in Switzerland in 1952, he assembled a group of his black-and-white photographs into a spiral-bound book, a maquette he titled Black White and Things. In arranging his images, Frank sought to express a broader range of emotion than was typical in the photojournalism of his era. A phrase from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince (1943) appears on a typeset page at the beginning:
it is only with the heart that one can see
rightly
what is essential is invisible to the eye
Beneath this Frank included the following statement:
sombre people and black events
quiet people and peaceful places
and the things people have come in contact
with
this, I try to show in my photographs
The thirty-four photographs in the book maquette are divided into three sections: “Black,” “White,” and “Things.”
2023
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Robert Frank
American, born Switzerland.1924–2019 294 works onlineRobert Frank’s restless, gritty, melancholic vision marked him as an astute documentarian of the postwar American landscape. Born into a German-Jewish family in Zurich in 1924, he developed an interest in photography at an early age and apprenticed with several photographers in his teens.
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