{"id":32310,"date":"2019-09-10T15:53:26","date_gmt":"2019-09-10T15:53:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/?p=32310"},"modified":"2022-09-01T21:10:05","modified_gmt":"2022-09-01T21:10:05","slug":"la-bonta-di-robert-frank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/la-bonta-di-robert-frank","title":{"rendered":"Rest in photography, Robert Frank"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Robert Frank died yesterday. If I know something about photography I owe it to him. He certainly taught me the difference between a good photo and a beautiful photo.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Today I was talking to some friends and I discovered they had never heard of him before, for at least two reasons: because Frank had almost stopped photographing in the 1960s \u2014 devoting himself to directing \u2014 because Frank is the perfect example of a not-so-popular but incredibly influential artist.<\/span><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s the paradox of popularity vs influence: you can be popular and not influence anything culturally, or be unknown and influence the culture of decades to come.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Frank was certainly popular among photographers but the influence he had on the broad visual vocabulary was really powerful.<\/span><\/p>\n

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His message has been so strong that today, because of him, \u201cdirty and realistic\u201d photography is accepted. Even if not for the most part, we owe him a lot.<\/span><\/p>\n

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I remember when I looked at his famous \u201cThe Americans\u201d book for the first time, many years ago. I didn\u2019t understand it. I didn\u2019t even like it, maybe because my visual literacy was stuck at the concept of beauty. I didn\u2019t find any beautiful pictures in that book: all I saw were grainy, technically questionable, edgy photos, often composed up to the point of visual collapse, being therefore unstable, even annoying.<\/span><\/p>\n

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What I did not grasp was the story; it was how good those images were. I closed the book with the feeling that I hadn\u2019t see anything beautiful, but with a story in my head. He told me that story.<\/span><\/p>\n

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He had not photographed the Americans: he had told them, touring 48 states in the USA back in 1958. After seeing his photos \u2014 his photographic story, I should say \u2014 I understood the USA more.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The story he told was not about the Promised Land. He was not interested in delivering any glossy and apologetic image of that country. He, a Swiss and a foreigner, saw and documented what was wrong and unfair there: broken landscapes, unstable human relationships, sidewalks trampled by the rich and the poor. The US was not only that but it was that, too, and he had decided to tell it, with unsurpassed harshness and honesty. No coincidence that this book was simply called \u201cThe Americans\u201d; not \u201cBeautiful America\u201d \u200b\u200bor \u201cAmerica The Strongest\u201d. \u201cAmericans\u201d: the people, the landscapes, the humanity.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The quality of his photos exceeds beauty because they contain it. If you look carefully there is all the beauty of humanity and honesty in those photos. There is also the unique ability of photography to show the nudity of the soul, to strip people down and show them how they really are: sleepy workers drinking coffee at the bar, old decrepit men, worried mothers, businessmen without scruples. A humanity unaware it\u2019s been caught in its own nakedness as it walks through a city 1958\u2019s America.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Yet it is a humanity that certainly does not have an aesthetic beauty but has that of its very nature. It\u2019s like that and in no other way.<\/span><\/p>\n

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It does not hide or make you believe that you are other than what you are. Frank caught that inner nature that becomes beautiful in being un-aesthetic. It is as aesthetic as only truth can be.<\/span><\/p>\n

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A certain kind of beauty \u2014 the deepest and thickest \u2014 does not appear and does not reveal herself. It\u2019s shaped like a story, visually told. A story must be listened to, reconstructed in the mind, imagined.<\/span><\/p>\n

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You must listen to Robert Frank, with your eyes.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ieri \u00e8 morto Robert Frank. Se ho capito qualcosa di fotografia lo devo a lui.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32312,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,94],"tags":[76,77,122],"class_list":["post-32310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-fotografia","tag-fotografia","tag-photography","tag-robert-frank"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}