Robert Frank (1) (1924–2019)

Containing photographs taken between 1948 and 1952, Black White and Things was in it´s original form a book hand-crafted by Robert Frank in 1952. Frank made three identical copies designed by Werner Zryd, each with spiral binding and original photographs. Printed for an exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington in 1994, Frank has redesigned the book.

Separated into three categories "black", "white", and "things", which are shaped more by mood than subject matter, the book traces Frank´s travels to cities such as Paris, New York, valencia and St. Louis. In the white section for instance, he brings photographs of vastly different motifs unser a single aesthetic umbrella - his first wife reclining with their new-born baby, peasants squatting against a flaking wall in Peru, and a business man strolling past a snow-decked tree in London.

For Frank, as always, his aim is a humble one shaped by sentiment: "somber people and black events / quiet people and peaceful places / and the things people have come in contact with / this, I try to show in my photographs."… (more)

Robert Frank_s film One Hour is a single-take of Frank and actor Kevin O_Connor either walking or riding in the back of a mini-van through a few blocks of Manhattan_s Lower East side. Shot between 3:45 and 4:45 pm on 26 July, 1990 the film presents the curious experience of eavesdropping involuntarily on strangers. It appears to be a document of a journey but is also a kind of stream of consciousness retracing the same patterns and spaces. This book is a reprint of a little-known Frank publication first issued by Hanuman Books in 1992, a tiny book, comprising mainly a transcription of the dialogue heard but also two pages of credits: half a dozen production or crew workers and 27 actors. Unravelling the apparent documentary nature of the film, there is also an acknowledgement that the film has a script (by Frank and his assistant, Michal Rovner), that a conversation heard in a diner is written by Mika Moses, and that Peter Orlovsky's lines (intercepted by Frank roughly halfway through the hour, in front of the Angelika Cinema on Houston Street) are 'total improvisation'… (more)