Robert Frank Swiss American, 1924-2019

Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1924. He arrived in the United States in 1947, worked with Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar, and subsequently became a freelance photographer. He then travelled to Bolivia, Peru, Spain, Paris, and Wales.

In 1954, he received a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York to travel across the United States over a two-year period. The Americans was first published in Paris in 1958 by Robert Delpire. The book went on to become one of the most influential photography books of the twentieth century, inspiring generations of photographers.

Having completed The Americans, Frank turned to filmmaking and made his first film, Pull My Daisy, in 1959. Here, too, he would become a legendary figure, this time in underground cinema.

Frank returned to photography in the 1970s. Working with black-and-white Polaroid film, he took his approach in a more radical direction, creating expressionistic montages and developing a body of work that was largely autobiographical.

Robert Frank died on 9 November 2019 in Inverness, Nova Scotia, Canada.