Robert Frank - Mabou / John Cohen - Pull My Daisy

Excerpt from the text by STUART ALEXANDER

This exhibition embodies a story of friendship, and beyond Robert Frank’s own circle of friends, it speaks about creative process.

In the spring of 1958, Frank’s book of photographs from his Guggenheim-supported travels across America was sent to the printer for release in the fall by Delpire as Les Américains. In that summer between, he engaged in three creative projects. He rode New York City buses alone while photographing out the window; he spent all night at Coney Island on the 4th of July, again alone, photographing people mostly sleeping on the beach; and he experimented filming his family and a group of friends at a beach on Cape Cod with a 16mm movie camera. By the end of the summer he found that the solitary activity of making still photographs no longer satisfied his creative urge. He felt that photographs on their own, even in groups or sequences, were too mute, they needed words, sound and movement.

During that period, Frank lived in the East Village in a neighborhood of writers, musicians and artists of all sorts. With his friends and neighbors, Alfred Leslie, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac among many others, they combined talents to make the film Pull My Daisy based on a play by Kerouac. Frank’s friend and neighbor, John Cohen, was making a name for himself as a leading figure in the American Folk Music Revival through his gathering and dissemination of field recordings of older musicians and especially with his band The New Lost City Ramblers. In addition to being a musician, ethno-musicologist and filmmaker, Cohen was also knowledgeable about Peruvian textiles and an accomplished photographer. Frank made photographs for the Ramblers’ record album covers so it was natural for him to ask Cohen to be stills photographer on the production of Pull My Daisy.

Cohen was an insider. More than simple movie stills, these are fresh and intimate portrayals of collaborators such as Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky and Larry Rivers in addition to Leslie, Ginsberg and Kerouac. He photographed French actress Delphine Seyrig here in her first movie appearance. Also, in one of the photos are Frank’s then wife Mary and their son Pablo. These images were all captured during the making of this improvisational landmark of what came to be known as the New American Cinema.

Pull My Daisy features many of the characteristics of this film movement such as real-life settings, hand-held camera, non-professional actors and independent financing. Included here is a record of their innovative way to promote the movie. They hired a horse-buggy from Central Park, attached handmade signs and drove around the city handing out daisies to people on the street.

Unlike The Americans which was a commercial and critical failure when it appeared, Pull My Daisy received a significant amount of praise, although no real commercial success either. But it gave Frank sufficient encouragement and impetus to continue in his aspirations to make films, so for the next decade he devoted his creative energy exclusively to filmmaking.

Stuart ALEXANDER

Independent curator

Photography historian