The lecturer W.J.T Mitchell, who is a Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, explained a paradigm that I did not find in the Robert Frank gallery displayed in the Berman Museum of Art. Mitchell gave us a detailed description of Robert Frank’s beginnings and successfully showed us a drive within Robert Franks photographs that captured his enamor of American culture, his immigrant status in America, and spoke in an ephemeral manner about the spirit of America. Robert Frank’s creative process with the camera is compared to the functions of a medium within a séance, underlining Robert Frank as an artist whose vision was used as the speaking tool of America culture. This argument is affective and came across in Mitchell’s look at Robert Frank’s spy versus spy analysis, looking at Frank’s use of “off the hip shots” and the castrating voyeuristic angles of his shots. This hidden secrecy found in Robert Frank’s photos give the viewer a piercing look at the cultural reality of America at the time.
Going through The Americans by Robert Frank, Mitchell creates an illuminating analysis of a series of trends and links, which are found between the photographs in regards to the lifeblood of America. The array of photographs that were used in the presentation helped create a portal into Mitchell’s metaphorical vision-seeking analysis. This search into the personality of Robert Frank’s photography sends us into the ephemeral state that Mitchell wanted us to see. This is captured in Frank’s factory photography of assembly lines and skilled laborers, contrasting of Caucasian Americans and African Americans, military, American roads, and American cultural activity. Mitchell cited these photos as “[not] immediately telling you what you’re seeing,” calling for attention at different angles then one might expect. One example of this was the Navy Recruitment Coordinator’s photograph, crassly suggesting anti-war sentiment by exposing the recruitment officer’s relaxed freely propped feet. Looking at the culture of the time, Frank captures Greasers with dark leathers and jukebox meditation gathering in their musical birthright, Jazz and Rock & Roll.
Having looked at the exhibit many times in an attempt to create my own analysis and to further my skills as a photographer, these insights greatly changed my perception of Robert Frank’s work. Where I once saw straightforward anatomical photography crafted with some subject by high intrusiveness singular to itself, I now see an entirety that creates a dense vision of times gone by. Mitchell comments on the segregation found between black and white as a piercing look at American racism, but also looks at it as a message that America is mixing and connecting cultures. Mitchell stated “the U.S. is portrayed as a homogenous grid that can be allocated through the representation of the roads.” The snap shots of the military, political institutions, postage offices, and people within the city, create an organism of American culture connected by illustrious roads, which reflects the time period. The castration of figures at the waist, or even full decapitations pushed photography past where it statically resided in straight shots of anatomically correct individuals. Mitchell says that Frank decapitated his subjects because that’s how he saw himself, sourcing Franks portrait shot of his reflection in a barber shop chair. Mitchell goes on to characterize Frank as a ghost, “sucking the pink juice of America” through his vision.
This characterization of Frank as an ethereal aspect correlates with the insights made into his use as a medium for American spirit, and by elimination of the medium places Frank as the spirit that is looking at America.
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