A comprehensive new essay by Arnaud Claass, published by Filigranes Editions in 2018, offers fresh perspectives on the work of renowned Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. The 160-page study aims to broaden understanding of Frank's career by examining his complete body of work spanning over sixty years, rather than focusing solely on his most famous publication, "The Americans."
Claass positions Frank's legendary book "The Americans" alongside his other editorial masterpieces, including "The Lines of My Hand," which was reissued by Steidl last year. The essay also extensively discusses Frank's considerable influence on independent cinema through his filmmaking work. Using various analytical tools, Claass strives to present a multi-faceted reading of this great artist's creative adventure.
The study traces a significant shift in Frank's work beginning in 1971, when he began alternating between periods of withdrawal to his isolated house in Nova Scotia and phases of social immersion through teaching, commissions, and filmmaking. This change was profoundly influenced by personal tragedies: the death of his daughter Andrea in a plane crash and the incurable illness of his son Pablo, who died in 1994. These losses led Frank to adopt a more meditative and stylistically different approach to both his photographic and cinematographic work.
Drawing inspiration from literary figures such as Swiss writer Robert Walser, Frank began to blend life stories with formal innovations. He developed what Claass describes as "a feeling of self as a narrative perpetually restarted," without falling into narcissistic introspection or abandoning his curiosity about the world. This approach allowed him to maintain a balance between self-reflection and genuine engagement with his surroundings.
When "The Americans" first appeared in its American edition, critics initially attributed it to what they saw as the malice of a broken photographer. However, as critical opinion shifted, the book eventually became the cult work it is known as today, securing Frank's place in the legend of artistic achievement. His subsequent films and his transition to photography increasingly devoted to ordinary life during his months of retreat on the wild coast of Mabou completed what Claass calls Frank's "impressive gesture."
Frank's lifestyle alternated between isolation in the harsh climate of Nova Scotia and immersion in the chaos of New York. He also traveled for teaching assignments and rare commissions, including a story on the 1984 Democratic Convention for California magazine and the 1996 video "Summer Cannibals" with his friend Patti Smith. His musical connections were notable, including photographing Tom Waits for his "Rain Dogs" album cover and inspiring Bruce Springsteen, whose manager Jon Landau introduced him to "The Americans." Springsteen famously declared that he wished he could write songs the way Frank photographed.
Above all, Frank became what Claass describes as "the untamed and intimidating lord of an unprecedented autobiographical demand, conducted along a thread dotted with fragments and flashes." His earlier work, including "The Americans" and his youthful images from Paris, Wales, London, and Peru, took on new meaning as chapters in a long personal odyssey. By giving his work an increasingly internalized tone, Frank wove a network of narrative threads—some complete narratives, others barely begun, but all bound by a discontinuous current.
This artistic evolution created what Claass calls "an inevitably precarious balance between self-relation and self-invention." Frank's approach bore the characteristics of what philosopher Michel Foucault termed "self-concern," joining a tradition that includes historical and contemporary figures from Seneca to Michel Leiris and Paul Nizon, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, through Montaigne and Robert Walser. The comparison extends to existential filmmakers like Johan Van der Keuken and Boris Lehman.
The essential insight, according to Claass, is that while we may understand that the autonomous Self is ultimately a delusion, we cannot live without this fiction because it is vitally necessary to us. In Frank's case, the subsequent integration of "The Americans" into this inner narrative gave his entire body of work its complex and particular character. The return to self that characterized his post-1958 works cast a retrospective light on the earlier book, transforming his 1955 journey through American social and geographical reality into another form of self-reflection—what philosopher Paul Ricoeur would call a "narrative identity."
However, Claass emphasizes that this interpretation does not diminish the exceptional strength of "The Americans" or suggest that the work responds to a psychologizing conception of subjectivity. Frank himself protected against this introspective interpretation, declaring that he was "always looking outside, trying to look inside, trying to say something true." While this statement might seem to support psychological interpretation through its emphasis on the crossing of gazes between external world and internal spirit, Claass argues it does not justify what he calls "fetishism of the abyss."
Seeking existential truth through a proper relationship with the external world, Claass concludes, does not mean indulging in worship of interiority—at least not the kind of interiority that Walter Benjamin ironically identified with bourgeois comfort, from which one can indulge in satisfied observation of the surrounding world. This interpretation, which Victor Burgin used in his study of the history of mentalities, serves as a framework for understanding Frank's unique contribution to both photography and cinema as forms of authentic self-expression rooted in genuine engagement with the world.
