Robert Frank speaks, part two

Continued from this morning with National Gallery of Art curator Sarah Greenough and photographer Robert Frank...

And so curator and artist discussed the journeys that led to The Americans. Greenough explained to the audience how police in Arkansas arrested Frank, mostly for being non-Southern. "I was alone and it was very difficult," Frank said. I was lucky and I just continued my trip. [The arrest] encouraged me to take a sharp look at these people and how they leaned against a wall or how they looked at you or at women. It made me a reporter."

Frank explained how sometimes in an effort to alleviate the loneliness he felt, especially in the South, he'd pick up hitchhikers. The blacks he would pick up would invariably insist on sitting in the backseat, and Frank said he had trouble adjusting to that. Greenough noted that, in fact, many of Frank's finest pictures were of minorities, and that perhaps that was because he himself is Jewish.

Frank nodded. "I also think that these people are more photogenic than white people." Greenough quickly jumped in: "OK, we won't go there."

But why not? Clearly there was something in 'outsiderness' to which Frank related, and it comes out time and time again in his work. Greenough eventually found a way to sorta go there, by showing Frank's photograph of a couple reclining on a hill in San Francisco.

"This is my favorite photograph of all," Frank said. "It is an invasion of people in their private lives and they were just looking at the view. So was I. It was a really good moment to get." Frank explained that as the couple turned around to confront him, he continued to snap away, pretending he was shooting a 360-degree panorama. Greenough complimented Frank on his ability to catch moments like that.

"Often photography is an accident," he said. "But if an accident happens three times it is not an accident any more. "

Frank didn't just play for laughs. A recurring theme in his remarks was how much he admired how Jack Kerouac and many other people he encountered on his trips loved America. He spoke repeatedly about the importance of spontaneity, how he wielded it as a strategy in Peru, in Europe and in the United States. He spoke tenderly about how he never quite found another 'Americans' in his film work, that's why he returned to photography: "Maybe the films didn't give or get me the recognition that I thought they should."

Greenough asked Frank about his comfort with his post-Americans fame. "I see it more as some shadow that's kind of following me," Frank said. "I have to find out how I feel about that shadow. I'm just happy to have reached the age I've reached. I'm lucky that way. I keep working and maybe I can put something together."

Near the end of the conversation, Greenough showed my favorite Frank: a picture Frank took at his then-home in Mabou, Nova Scotia, with Mabou Harbour or the Northumberland Strait off in the distance. Thinking of what Frank said about fame, Greenough asked him if hanging his own work on a clothesline was a way of looking back at an important time in his life. Frank peered at the image and smiled.

"That was a lovely house we had there," he said. "But, you see, you have to create the foreground yourself."

[Images: Top: Robert Frank, San Francisco, 1956. Private collection. Bottom: Robert Frank, Mabou, Nova Scotia, 1977. Collection of the National Gallery of Art.]