A Morning with Robert Frank
Recently on LinkedIn — an awful place — I saw someone memorializing twenty years at their company with an AI-imaging of their first day. Surely it would have been better for no image to have been provided: the uncanny body, the wall calendar which was correct for only the first seven days before becoming gibberish, the bizarrely neat mise-en-scène avalanched into an overwhelming sense of grotesque absurdity. But of course this image was accepted by its viewers amidst a long train of other such images, any one of which would act as an emetic if examined closely.
It is difficult believe that photos once swayed entire generations and merited introductions by Jack Kerouac, as Robert Frank's seminal photo album The Americans (1959) did. We are asked to gulp down such putrid AI trash that the idea of staring at a single scene for even a minute seems like a penal sentence. Yet here lies the invigorating health of Frank’s work, with which I have begun most recent days: a studied view of a moment which, if not whole, is cohesive and suggestive of the world around it and invites lingering.
Here is Frank in Washington Park, New York City, before three men. The fringe men look to the distant right, perhaps at traffic, bejowled and lanternjawed; but the center man, his gaunt shaven face suggestive of former youth, is looking almost behind Frank, as if in another moment he would peer into the film itself. His skin is pale and sunlit, smelling of talcum powder; the funereal darkness of his heavy overcoat, in which he sticks all of his right hand except his thumb, is mirrored by the sable shadow of his hat which he clasps in his left. This homburg frames his head perfectly in an uneven but complete ring of felt, almost a reverse saintly aura. He seems dead and yet his eyes are so thoroughly alive that you feel he does not belong here between these two other men who are more workaday like us. A chance Manhattan afternoon.
The next page: a scene from the South, a playground in the Carolinas. The gloomy trees over-dominate the frame, especially one massive and uninteresting trunk. There is that sense of mugginess within shade, a chill without refreshment. Spanish moss makes the scene cramped until the bottom right, the sudden blaze of a sunlit metal slide revealing the immense height of the forest. The metal gleams in the antebellum sun, polished by butts and legs and jeans worn as proof against its oven heat (you can feel it now, can you not?) and then... to the left of the slide, past a tree, a mother with a child in her arms, like an afterthought to it all.
Were this a dream, I would meditate on its meaning for days. As one photograph of a hundred, it is already too much to give my attention for longer than five minutes in the rapid pre-commute mornings. I begin to flip to the next photograph, the next world… I am on the slippery slope to today's gluttonous buffet of glutinous slop by the pound, devoured and defecated in the same second.
I close the book. I must think on what I have seen for the day, for I have seen five lives which burst into and out of existence before me, and intersected against all odds through Frank's handheld camera with mine, a poor modern man's.
