Further thought about Frank

One of the best things about the Frank show is the opportunity to look at contacts from the project and at prints that he ultimately rejected. Among these were images that I thought were fantastic. They were often quite graphic and very sensitive to qualities of light. Yet they didn't make the cut. The final series doesn't traffic much in light or in strong graphics. Maybe it is my background in theater...or my dramatic sensibility...but I would have picked any number of these.

So why didn't he?

It seems that Robert really tried to join the photo establishment of his day, tried to get work into Life, etc. And he kept getting rejected. In the end he was more or less left with no  choice but to wander off and do his own work, which seemed to be always pulling at him anyway.

And somewhere in the writings of the book Looking In he refers to a sense that, after years of trying, he is finally getting this elusive and un-nameable thing he was after into his photos.

I think that he was after something very subtle, impossible to describe or even concieve, especially before he had done it, and that perhaps he had to turn aside from graphics and effects to get to this finer thing. It was really hard, but he set off after something that was beyond words and also beyond any pictures that he had taken. He was after something that he did not even know was there.

There's a similar effort cited in the biography of Diane Arbus, in a quote from a diary where she talks about having worked for months and months to try to get at something she couldn't name or concieve of. And in this quote  she says something along the lines that she thinks, maybe, something of it might be creeping into her photos.

In both cases, this is playing at the highest level. And obviously it's a bit lonely out on the front edge of what you are doing, beyond experience and concepts. After one manifests whatever one was after, one can see that it was potentially there. Before that moment, there's no certainty, none at all. That's hard work.