Celebrating the Centenary of Robert Frank
Danziger Gallery is pleased to celebrate the centenary of Robert Frank with an online exhibition comprised of 20 prints from the years 1948 – 1968.
Born in Zurich in 1924, Frank started his photographic career as a European photojournalist but drawn to the more poetic possibilities of the medium and the opportunities he hoped would emerge he emigrated to America in 1947.
As an immigrant and with America as his base, Frank began to explore his own personal vision of the world through his adopted country and while justly celebrated for his American photographs, he still traveled making pictures in England, Wales, France, and Peru.
What Frank brought to the medium was an improvisational quality that saw the world in a different but more truthful way than the commonly perceived visual clichés of his time. While the often dark and idiosyncratic nature of his vision shocked many people, it led the way to much of what has followed in photography.
Estimated to have shot over 50,000 different pictures in the above years, Frank edited ruthlessly, only making prints of the images he felt were the most resonant.
About the prints:
By the late 1970s, Frank had turned his primary attention away from photography to film making and in order to fund both his life and his film work, in 1978 he sold his existing archive of prints along with several hundred prints made to complete the transaction. The prints exhibited here all come from that purchase — the largest private collection of this most important figure in the history of the medium.