Robert Frank, Homework #4

The short video “In Unseen Photos, A clearer Picture of Robert Frank’s America” by KQED shows a brief description of the exhibition in Stanford where very rare photographs taken by Robert Frank were showcased but weren’t in his very well-known book, The Americans. The themes of the photographs shown in the exhibition varied from simple to political or even bleak. Frank showed Americans as boring, uninterested people who were living a very usual life yet he repeatedly took portraits of them because they are “the building block of society” as described by Peter Galassi. Some of his photographs seemed meaningless but when you think back to the time they were taken, they told stories of history. One of those photos was taken of an African-American woman holding a white child. He later explained how he couldn’t understand how a white southern lady would trust her child with a black woman but wouldn’t sit and eat next to her. Frank showed interest in the south through his photographs that were taken before the Civil Rights movement, many of his photographs were focused on racism. I believe that Frank’s photography is very artistic because, despite the fact that you could feel the racism or the sense of raw photographs, there’s always a sense of question that comes to mind when studying his photographs, because they show an incomplete story.