The “Unseen” Photography of Robert Frank The “Unseen” Photography of Robert Frank
Art

The “Unseen” Photography of Robert Frank

An Interview with Martin Gasser
Ania Diduch, Wojtek Wieteska
Reading
time 4 minutes

60 years ago, Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank’s photobook The Americans was published in the US. A series of striking images shot on the road, Frank’s collection cut through the country’s supposed post-war prosperity to show a side of American society ridden with anxiety, despair and loneliness. Jack Kerouac, the Beat poet who wrote the introduction to The Americans, put it thusly: “To Robert Frank I now give you this message: You got eyes.”

Wnętrze wystawy/fragment ekspozycji: stykówka The Americans.
Wnętrze wystawy/fragment ekspozycji: stykówka The Americans.

Frank himself may have had

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Minas Gerais, Brasil. Photo by Jaime Dantas/Unsplash
Nature

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The Genesis of Sebastião Salgado’s Latter Photography
Agata Kasprolewicz

Looking at death can make you start dying. The photographer’s eye has no natural protective layers; no special screen or filter. It absorbs and sucks in everything it sees. Death invaded Sebastião Salgado through his camera lens in 1994, when he was documenting the bloody slaughter in Rwanda.

What he loved the most about photography – the possibility of encapsulating a fleeting moment forever on film – became his curse. The deaths he captured in his photographs would remain etched inside him, in his mind and body. After his return from the Rwandan hell, Salgado began suffering from various ailments. Infections were blooming all over his body. When making love with his wife, he would ejaculate blood instead of semen. After a series of tests, his doctor told him: “Sebastião, you aren’t ill. Your prostate is in perfect condition. But you have seen so much death you are starting to die yourself. You must stop doing what you do, or you will end up dead.”

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