Poetic eye

It is not Robert Frank’s fault, but one might think from the hype — ‘arguably the world’s greatest living photographer’, etc. — that he had invented documentary photography. When Humphrey Spender, who did for Mass Observation and Picture Post in the 1930s and 1940s what Frank did for social documentation in the 1950s, was similarly praised, he pointed out that photography had been an instrument of social change since the 1870s. And the photo-journalist’s favourite camera, the 35mm Leica, was invented in 1914.

Spender, who at 94 is 14 years Frank’s senior, abandoned photography for painting long ago, but coincidentally also has a photographic show, Moroccan Diary (at the Photographers’ Gallery, 5 Great Newport Street, London WC2, until 23 November), celebrating the republication of a 1936 travelogue.

Frank left his Swiss homeland in 1947, the same time as Cartier-Bresson helped to found the photo-journalist agency Magnum. His first job in New York was for Harper’s Bazaar, whose star photographers included Cartier-Bresson and Bill Brandt. Frank’s early book, London–Wales, focusing on city gents and Welsh miners, was openly indebted to Brandt. In the USA he also befriended and learned from the older Walker Evans, famous for his photographs of impoverished rural Americans in the Depression.

All this is worth knowing if Frank’s peculiar melancholy and his originality are to be appreciated. As John Szarkowski, director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, wrote in 1968: ‘It is difficult to remember how shocking Robert Frank’s book [The Americans] was [to Americans]. He established a new iconography for contemporary America, comprised of bits of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars and unknowable faces.’

For The Americans, published in 1958, Frank chose only 83 images from 28,000.