Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Robert Frank "The American" at the NGA



Robert Frank's Exhibit in the National Gallery of Art

I had a chance to view this exhibition today and it blew me away.
Robert Frank's "The American" is beautiful sequenced
with four sections, all starting with an image of the American flag.
This series truly captures American people and the place at the time.
Above are a few of my favorite images from the series.
I don't think that individually these images say
what Frank says with the complete body of work,
but they are my favorites as individual images.



In the middle of the exhibition, they show a few of his contact sheets.
It was great to see how he edited down to 83 from around 28,000.
Seeing his editing and sequencing
definitely made me reevaluate my own sequencing.
It was also helpful to see how he cropped some of his images
and how much of an impact that made on the image and the series.
This made me think about how I shoot and my reaction to
the initial image on the contact sheet or on the back of the digital camera.
Sometime I feel like what I see is what I get,
but really its what I have to edit even further.

Robert Frank really put his grant from the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to amazing use.



2 comments:

  1. I'm glad you got to see the show, and I agree with everything you said. The show was fantastic- it was great to be able to see his contact sheets and some work prints.

    ReplyDelete
  2. John Wood is friends with him. Ive seen some nice photos taken of him by John in his sketchbooks!

    ReplyDelete