BLOG # 10
I know a little about this photograph. Well actually I know a little about it’s a backstory, it’s genesis. For the moment I will try and put that to one side and look again at the image.
A window. Open I guess since I see no reflective glass. An unhappy pair of lace curtains, dirty and only half carrying out their proper function. They hang. Hang in one of those moods where nothing really matters, ennui. They simply don’t care.
And immediately beyond? A pipe? Flue? Chimney? A non-functioning pipe or flue, squeezed into unemployment. And then, roofs, flat roofs. The buildings, dark, uninviting and a little forbiding. Underneath? Factories? Workshops? Some kind of retail? An uninviting black expanse. Foreboding.
And then look to the right hand bottom corner of the photograph, a multi story corner somehow disconnected from the rest of the image. Very strange, how did it get there? I’m sure it hasn’t been photo shopped in later!
To the left a street, bright in the evening, no, perhaps not, more likely a morning sun kicking off the shiny wet surface. Street lights, cars, gardens. A suburb? And then to clash with this imagining, industry. A coal mine pit-head silhouetted, its winding gear ready for the coal and for the coal miners below. Slag heaps beyond testify to the longevity of the coal industry here. A blast of steam or smoke, industry alive and kicking.
And on the streets not a single soul, empty of human activity. A ghost town? Perhaps everyone is at work, gainfully employed. It clearly has industry and the number of cars on the street point towards a thriving economy, a town alive despite its ghostly appearance. Whatever the reality, the image is a melancholic view. It is not a view of hope, a view of a brighter future. It’s a view of pessimism, a lack of faith. A kind of sadness mixed with a kind of no-where-ness.
I would like to suggest that this visual perspective is a direct result of the complex mindset of the photographer. He clearly is not from here. Can you imagine a worker employed at the coal-mine snapping this picture on his way to work or at a moments of leisure? No. This is the view of an outsider with a darker, more pessimistic view of this world.
The photographer is Robert Frank. The photograph and image from the famous/infamous photo book The Americans. It is known as ‘View from a Hotel Room, Butte Montana’.
Robert Frank was indeed an outsider, originally from Switzerland, he emigrated to the USA in 1947 where he somehow became a fashion photographer.
He secured a Guggenheim Fellowship Grant in 1955 to travel across the USA. For the next two years he took road trips to all the major cities and States across the country. He took over 28,000 shots. By an amazing piece of editing he produced ‘The Americans’, a photo book with just 83 of these images.
The book was a revolution in photography, a milestone in the development of photographic style. It was also deeply controversial. The book was seen by some as deeply un-American, as miserable, as an unfair representation of a forward-looking nation.
There is no pity in his images. They are images of heightened hopelessness, of desolation and
preoccupation with death. They are images of an America seen by a joyless man who hates
the country of his adoption.
There is no pity in his images. They are images of heightened hopelessness, of desolation and
preoccupation with death. They are images of an America seen by a joyless man who hates the
country of his adoption.
Others of course thought it one of the most revolutionary photo books in the history of photography.
The fact is he simply feels strongly about some of the things he sees in his adopted country,
and wants to call it to our attention. He does it superbly.
Robert Franks was indeed a melancholic outsider, a voyeur with an attitude. His outsiders eyes enabled him to see the bleak reality of what the dream of the USA had become by the mid 1950s. He simply did not buy the dream.
At the same time it was a revolution in how to go about photography. A major new way of making images.
His photography welcomed strange angles, dramatic compositions, elements clearly out of focus, under exposure, and visible grain.
Photography with an ironic view of the prevailing culture, and alternative view beyond the surface.
It stuck. The photographic perspectives, the angles, compositions, the irony became a new way of looking for photographers. A new generation of Photographers who stripped away the pessimistic perspective and retained the style, the techniques of Robert Frank.
The qualities of his photography became the touchstone for a new generation of American photographers.
Controversial YES . . . Influential YES.
PHOTOGRAPHS
All from The Americans by Robert Frank
QUOTES
There is no pity . . . . Bruce Downes, Popular Photography, vol. 46, no. 5 (May 1960)
Meaningless blur . . . . Popular Photography magazine
It is impossible . . . Critic Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014
The fact is he simply . . . H. M. Kinzer, Popular Photography magazine
I do hope you are all enjoying the blogs, or at least find them interesting. Your comments I read with enthusiasm, so please do keep them coming.
Take good care
Richard
I was in London the other day to visit the National Gallery. Something I often do to remind myself of good painting. It’s often when my own work is not going well. At this time of the year there are a lot of tourists and the one thing that makes them different from tourists of say twenty years ago is there are no cameras. Not the big camera bag strapped to the hip with telephoto lenses of various sizes and rolls of film and filters and all the rest. It’s now the ubiquitous phone. All the expensive camera shops missing from the high street. I still have my old 35mm SLR. In fact I retrieved it from the box it lives in from the cupboard in my studio after one such adventure up town. I was shocked to find it has a film still inside. Half exposed. I decided to leave it in there. And when I’m gone someone who knows nothing about cameras will open it and expose the film and all will be lost. Or maybe they will leave it as I have done. it’s back in it’s box now. Something rather warming about it.
Dear Richard, a number of comments but first a generalisation. I have wanted to comment on many of your postings but held myself back because to some degree I simply disagree with lots of your suppositions (although, I grant, many others may hold and uphold them). But I’m not going to do that today! The Americans is a book I actually have!
I always look at your posted photographs before I read the texts. What a familiar trap images are, leading one momentarily down wrong paths and misdirection. Is this what prejudice is? I immediately thought this was a picture of coal mining and south Wales, but it is not. Although it has many likenesses, the hills, the pithead, the smoke, there are indicators that this is not so. The cars for one. Then the buildings for another – there are no terraced houses. And perhaps there is another unconscious connection at play, the fact that Robert Frank (like many other famous photographers seem to have a fetish for Welsh miners) spent time in Wales. A brief bit of research informs us that Butte, Montana was not a coal mining area, but of copper, gold and silver – so it inhabits the same rich plunder and destruction that goes with these industries – thus, I guess, their familiarity and similarity.
A friend of mine has written a couple of books about Rudy Burkhardt (both Frank and Burkhardt are both Swiss, as I believe was Vivian Maier, both contemporaneous, all 3 interested in similar subject matters). He profoundly dislikes Frank’s work – for why I no longer recall. I own a book of Burkhardt’s photography but haven’t looked at it for years, a lot of street scenes.
I’m not sure we can say Frank was an outsider or indeed a pessimist, being an immigrant is fundamentally American. Unfortunately having Kerouac write the introduction is to already colour it with a sadness with which Kerouac always imbues his work – sad, lonely, lost but nonetheless celebratory of America.
What I think is interesting about many of the photographs in the book is the photographer is viewed by many as an intruder but not a voyeur. Many of these photos capture this in their instantaneous – sort of hidden capture. My favourite is page 33, a consensual photograph, non confrontational, non voyeuristic and humane.
Love Robert Frank’s work, thank you, Richard. Interesting to read the different perspectives in terms of his impact in the States.
These blogs of yours are excellent Richard. So well expressed. Keep them coming.
Hello Richard,
Thank you for this image – it is one I know as like many I have‘the book’
Thank you also for pointing so much out.
I have always been drawn to the sheer misery and bleakness of it, there is something Welsh about it I think – rain, industry, buildings there for hard dirty work, a community built to serve someone else, not to better itself.
The person who took the picture is about to leave Butte, Montana. No one working there would need reminding of this scene and no one living there would want this view or be able to afford a camera (?) It is taken by a travelling person or someone wanting to make a social comment.
It has a frontier feel to it but as you say it is an established place with street lighting and some domestic dwellings.
The image also sticks two fingers up to the American Dream and most photography that preceded it. Nothing beautiful or tasteful here.
What does the room look like Richard ?
A good one,
Best wishes
John