In 1980, while teaching at the Creative Photography Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Frank gave his students an assignment: use a pack of Polaroid film to make a photographic statement that conveyed “all about who you are and where you’ve been and how you feel photography is related to all of that.” He appeared to take this direction to heart in his own work from this period. He often assembled Polaroids and text into combinations that resemble diary entries. In this work, the blunt language, etched in Frank’s handwriting, joins with shadowy imagery to augment the feeling of a lonely morning in a hotel room in downtown Los Angeles.
Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, Sep 15, 2024–Jan 11, 2025
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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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