歲月疏離 - Robert Frank

( Robert Frank / 1974 / Arnold Crane )

前兩天(11/9) 是羅勃‧弗蘭克的82歲生日...

他在50年前 (1955-56)
經 Walker Evans 推薦
拿到一筆「高更漢獎助金」
開著一部破舊的二手車,浪遊美國拍照
沿途紀錄只有膚色,沒有血色的美國眾生相

1958-59年他整理紀錄所得
於巴黎與紐約出版了個人攝影集:「美國人」
一開始就遭受各方人馬的冷言揶榆與漫罵
說他不懂攝影美學
因為畫面粗糙,模糊又晃動
說他是共產黨
因為它暴露了美國的冷漠與黑暗

等大家回過神來,才恍然大悟
那樣的犀利洞察,那樣的冷眼批判
弗蘭克已先知先行地跨越大家
並一舉改變了現代攝影的走向








1924年出生於瑞士/蘇黎世的弗蘭克
在納粹政權與冷戰年代中打混長大
他在 Bill Brandt 和 Walker Evans 作品中汲取營養
但身體裡終究流動著比尼客與波希米亞的血液

他在美國魂遊拍照時
經常面臨對方的咆哮與拳頭恐嚇
充分體受那種 Down and Out 的忐忑心緒
然而這就是50年代美國真正的社會風景

這些鮮活,陰暗的生活現場角落
恍惚,失神,冷酷,偶發的存活現實
在他十分個人風格的主導下
隱隱閃現時代的幽魂與靈光

50年前,弗蘭克以一種無意識/半意識/有意識的隱誨語言
隨興卻又深沉的視覺体悟
開創了一種疏離,沉鬱,寂寥與感傷的紀錄曲調
終成為現代攝影的一座里程碑







" When people look at my pictures
I want them to feel the way they do
when they want to read a line of a poem twice. "

--- Robert Frank ( 1951 )



















" There's something good about been a failure
--- it keeps you going ,
I mean , you look for it , to do it right . "

















" It's beautful to be alive .
but life isn't that beautful . "
















" Anybody who is going to be an artist has to be curious .
He must be obsessed with the photographs he shot . "
















" The best work you're done is the work you're done
when you have no power , no name , really . "


















( Robert Frank / 1975 / Richard Avedon )


" One of the worst things an artist can do
is talk about his work . "






喜歡弗蘭克的朋友們翻翻字典
這篇文章登在2004年10月24日" 觀察者 "上,非常值得一讀:


The big empty

The epic loneliness of Robert Frank's photographs has made them iconic images of 20th-century America. Now 80, and on the eve of a major retrospective, he grants Sean O'Hagan a rare interview


It was Jack Kerouac who first defined Robert Frank's genius, who found in it some echo of his own vision of a vast, broken-down, but still epic, America, peopled with restless and lonely dreamers. 'Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice,' wrote Kerouac in his now famous introduction to Frank's collection The Americans , 'with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America on to film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world'.

Fifty years later, Kerouac is long gone, likewise Alan Ginsberg, and nearly all the original Beat writers whose collective vision so chimed with that of the unobtrusive Swiss photographer. But Robert Frank survives: evasive, reclusive, unbowed. Now 80, the visual poet who defined America like no one before or since, has become as mythic as his iconic images. As I approach his studio-come-apartment on Bleeker Street in New York, two young men are standing on the pavement outside, one posing against his door as the other snaps him. Steve Pyke, the photographer who has cancelled a day's appointments in the slim hope that Frank will agree to have his picture taken, recalls that he too photographed this same door many years ago. The door, for the most part, remains firmly closed to visitors.

Robert Frank has agreed to a rare interview to coincide with a major retrospective of his work that opens at Tate Modern next week. He is palpably uncomfortable, though. 'I find this kind of thing so hard,' he says, collapsing into a wicker chair in the first-floor kitchen, which, like the rooms that disappear off it, is old-school bohemian, with old junk shop paintings, prints and postcards sharing wall space with small strange metal sculptures made by his second wife, the artist, June Leaf. She is nowhere to be seen today, but he proudly shows us a catalogue for a current retrospective of her work in Basle. They are kindred spirits, artists from another era when the work was everything, when the art took precedence over the individuals who created it. 'I envy her freedom', he says, 'to sit down in front of a blank page with no machine to get in the way. That is freedom. Photography is not freedom'.

He motions us to sit down at a rickety table on which a single bread roll shares space with a pile of books and papers, and a big old mobile phone which startles him every time it rings. 'People want to know so much now,' he sighs, shaking his head, and staring at the floor. 'All the time, this wanting to know. Where does it lead? Nowhere.' He eyes Pyke's tripod with genuine trepidation. 'Pictures, huh?' he mutters, 'We'll see, we'll see'. He closes his eyes tight, as if this is all a bad dream from which he might suddenly awake.

Robert Frank has been fleeing fame, and all attempts to pin him down, since The Americans thrust him into a brief notoriety in the mid-Fifties when many critics saw his images as anti-American. A decade later as the world caught up with his vision, he had already left photography behind for film, determined never to repeat himself creatively. He shot Ginsberg goofing off to a soundtrack of Kerouac in full verbal flow in Pull My Daisy (1959), caught the Rolling Stones at their most glamorously wasted in the little-seen Cocksucker Blues (1972), which the band did their best to suppress so accurate was its evocation of the drudgery and decadence of their nomadic lifestyle .
'They sent lawyers, they sent planes, they sent the sheriff,' he laughs. 'It was out of proportion, like everything they did. Keith was having difficulties with the authorities at that time with the drugs and so on, and Mick thought he didn't look as good on film as Keith. It was comical really. I fled to Nova Scotia. I just wanted to be left alone.'

Since then, the less Robert Frank has worked, the more his legend has grown, and the more he has retreated from it. 'The kind of photography I did is gone,' he says. 'It's old. There's no point in it anymore for me, and I get no satisfaction from trying to do it.' He says this without bitterness or regret, but with a sad matter-of-factness as ingrained as the lines on his face. 'There are too many pictures now. It's overwhelming. A flood of images that passes by, and says, "why should we remember anything?" There is too much to remember now, too much to take in.'

Except for the moments when his face lights up in a smile, Robert Frank looks as old as his years, and a little weary. His surroundings have a ramshackle feel, and, like his paint-stained and weather-beaten leather jacket and frayed T-shirt, betray no trace of the fact that his vintage prints now change hands on the art market for upwards of $80,000 apiece. 'It's just crazy', he shrugs, 'all these dealers and collectors, buying and selling and controlling everything. It seems insane to me, these prices. When I first started out, I was so excited to get $10 a picture. That was a big deal. To get paid at all for taking a picture was a big celebration.'

Frank started out in the 1940s, serving an old-style apprenticeship to a commercial photographers in his hometown, Zurich. His family were solidly bourgeois, with a maid and a collection of 19th-century realist art. 'I didn't know what I wanted as a teenager', he said later, 'but I knew I didn't want to be part of the smallness of Switzerland.' He fled to America in 1947, where he has remained ever since. 'I was 23 when I came here but I knew nothing of the world,' he laughs. 'I didn't know what a homosexual was. I had only ever seen one black person in Switzerland, and, believe me, it was a big event to see that woman. I was so innocent. I stood on Times Square and felt like I had arrived in the world.'

In 1947, he began working for Harper's Bazaar magazine, alongside Bill Brandt and Cartier-Bresson, but soon grew frustrated with the dictates of commercialism. He travelled to Peru and Bolivia for six months, pointing his Leica at peasants and nomads, formulating the detached, unsentimental style that would define The Americans . 'I was tired of romanticism,' he says. 'I wanted to present what I saw, pure and simple'. Back in New York, he met a young artist called Mary Lockspeiser, and, to his parents' horror, married her when she fell pregnant at 15. 'Oh yes,' he chuckles, 'that was a big scandal back home, but that's how you drift into a life. Those were different times, no one thought of a career, or life insurance, or buying the big house. You lived in the moment, and adapted.'

With Mary and his young son, Pablo, he travelled to England and Wales in the early Fifties, taking the pictures that would later comprise the book London-Wales. During this time, too, he tells me, he landed his first British ommission, celebrated in a letter to his mother - 'I will send you the "Observer", a very good newspaper, as soon as my photographs are published'. He smiles at the memory. 'Fifty years it takes them to come and take my photograph. This is what happens, everything comes around in circles.'

Back in New York, Frank's work was shown as part of a group show at Moma, and he met and befriended the great Walker Evans. 'He used me as his chauffeur. He had this big car and we'd drive to New England or some place to look at the buildings. Walker would get out and tell me to drive two blocks away and wait for him. He didn't want me to see how he worked, to share his secrets. But I learnt a lot from him anyway.' What was Evans like as a person? 'He had very good breeding. He'd always say: "Why do you hang out with those people, Robert? They really have no class."'

'Those people' were the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg and Orlovsky, with whom Frank was mingling in the bohemian scene in downtown New York. 'It was a very free time,' he says. 'People were searching for a new way to live. Everything was about right now. I felt that a very free kind of insanity was floating around in the air. The painters looked down on the photographers, but the writers got what I was doing right away. That instant moment was what they were after too. I learned a lot about how to live from those guys.'

Long before he got to read Kerouac's On The Road, Frank set off on his own similar odyssey across America. Funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, he shot 500 rolls of film in the course of three separate trips. Most of it has remained unseen. The edited result was The Americans, first published in 1959. 'It is difficult to remember how shocking Robert Frank's book was ... ' wrote the Moma curator John Szarkowski, in 1968. 'The pictures took us by ambush then ... He established a new iconography for contemporary America, comprised of bits of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces.'

Robert Frank had captured an everyday America, shrouded in an epic sense of loneliness, a sadness that Diane Arbus called 'a hollowness'. Some of that sadness was quintessentially American, to do with the vastness of the continent and the struggle to survive that many of its ordinary citizens engaged in, and some of it was to do with Robert Frank, his outsider's gaze. 'I think I always had a cold eye', he says, 'I always saw things realistically. But, it's also easier to show the darkness than the joy of life. Life is not beautiful all the time. Life can be good, then you lie down, and stare up at the ceiling, and the sadness falls on you. Things move on, time passes, people go away, and sometimes they don't come back.'

Robert Frank's daughter, Andrea, died in a plane crash in Guatemala in 1974, aged 20. An even deeper sadness pervades the strange and beautiful, meandering films Frank made following her death, and in the Polaroids he began taking soon afterwards. His work, he says, 'shifted from being about what I saw to being about what I felt'. To this end, the images are scratched and scribbled on, as if the act of photographing, in itself, were no longer enough. His early detachment was replaced by a nakedly confessional style which again was ahead of its time. 'I was really destroying the picture,' he says, staring at the floor. 'I didn't believe in the beauty of a photograph anymore.'

In a recent South Bank Show Frank spoke about his son, Pablo's long struggle with mental illness. Pablo died in 1994. 'He took the long hard road,' he says, when I linger before a photograph of the two of them, his son caught smiling and healthy by Frank's old friend, Eugene Richards. 'He never made it easy for himself.' He turns to stare out the window. 'You have to put the guilt aside and try to work. Keep going. What else is there to do?'

I ask him, finally, if he is happy with his place in the scheme of things. 'Happy is a big word. My wife says, "Robert, you are never satisfied." I guess I got where I wanted to get, but it didn't turn out to be the place I hoped it would be. I'm an outsider, still. How does that song by Johnny Cash go? "I'm a pilgrim and a stranger." I like that. That's how it is with me, and it's too late to change now.'

Sunday October 24, 2004 The Observer