<body><![CDATA[<b>Robert Frank photographed the forlorn flip side of the American Dream. Take a look at his cinematic vision, says Francesca Gavin</b>“Swiss, unobtrusive, nice,” as his friend Jack Kerouac described him, Robert Frank is one of the most influential photographers alive today. As a young man, he developed a third way for creative photography – somewhere between the Magnum-inspired conventions of photojournalism and the arty formalism of Walker Evans and Bill Brandt – that grew to epitomise the 1950s as much as David Bailey summed up the 1960s. Tate Modern’s large retrospective, beginning this month and coinciding with his 80th birthday, highlights the artist’s lasting influence. When Frank broke into the photographic world in the late 1940s, the camera was still regarded as an impartial observer, an emotionless eye alert to the “decisive moment”. Photo-stories in magazines such as Life either had crusading agendas or Henri Cartier-Bresson catching post-war humour and freedom through a lens. Frank’s approach was different. Photographs became an expression of his own inner experience and emotional intuition. They became personal; subjective glimpses of the sort that would soon be seen in cinema’s new wave. In 1958, Frank published his masterwork, The Americans, the culmination of a beat-era odyssey across the United States. Although greeted with some aggression at the time, the book revealed social truths hidden by the nation’s cultural propaganda. Always working in black-and-white, he was drawn to the ordinary and the disenfranchised and “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film”, as Kerouac wrote in his introduction. Yet the work’s narrative edge said as much about Frank and his perceptions as the country itself. Throughout the decades to come, Frank would blur the lines between poetry, painting and photography. More mixed media than mere image, his later work is the photographic equivalent of Cy Twombly’s energetic, abstract scribbles and arguably in step with other artists for whom the imperfect ephemera of the everyday can reveal life’s inner truth. Above all, though, Frank’s designs are lyrical: “When people look at my pictures. I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” Robert Frank: Storylines, Oct 28-Jan 23, Tate Modern, London; 020 7887 8888. Click <a href="asfunction:Tardis.webPageOpen,http://www.tate.org.uk"><b>here</b></a> for more information and to book tickets.Robert Frank picture, right, by Koos Breukel, courtesy of Van Zoetendall, Amsterdam. Other images © Robert Frank, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York]]></body>
