Robert Frank: Both Sides Now
A Public talk by Luc Sante
7:00pm Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario
Tickets
Photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank is still best known for The Americans, his 1958 book of 83 black-and-white photographs, selected from the thousands that he took during two years of travel across the country. The Americans is a foundational work in American photography and art history, both an homage to Walker Evans’ American Photographs and a loose, cinematic revisioning of post-war America.
Cultural critic, writer, historian Luc Sante maintains that there isn’t a documentary photographer who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s who didn’t absorb the book and reflect its lessons in some way. In his talk, Sante will consider Frank’s work and its enduring appeal.
Several of Robert Frank’s photographs are included in the upcoming exhibition Abstract Expressionist New York and display the intense originality that energized the avant-garde of the late 1950s.