[3] According to Frank, his mother, Rosa (other sources give her name as Regina), had a Swiss passport, while his father, Hermann originating from Frankfurt, Germany, had become stateless after losing his German citizenship as a Jew.
Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression.
[5] Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar.
[9] Though he was initially optimistic about the United States' society and culture, Frank's perspective quickly changed as he confronted the fast pace of American life and what he saw as an overemphasis on money.
[5] In 1955, Frank achieved further recognition with the inclusion by Edward Steichen of seven of his photographs (many more than most other contributors) in the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man that was to be seen by 9 million visitors and with a popular catalogue that is still in print.
[10] Frank's contributions had been taken in Spain (of a woman kissing her swaddled babe-in-arms); of a bowed old woman in Peru; a rheumy-eyed miner in Wales; and the others in England and the US, including two (one atypically soft-focus) of his wife in pregnancy; and one (later to be included in The Americans) of six laughing women in the window of the White Tower Hamburger Stand on Fourteenth Street, New York City.
[11] Inspired by fellow Swiss Jakob Tuggener's 1943 filmic book Fabrik,[12] Bill Brandt's The English at Home (1936),[13] and Walker Evans's American Photographs[14] (1938),[15] and on the recommendation of Evans (a previous recipient),[16] Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Leiberman, Edward Steichen, and Meyer Schapiro,[11] Frank secured a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation[17] in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph all strata of its society.
Cities he visited included Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan; Savannah, Georgia; Miami Beach and St. Petersburg, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Reno, Nevada; Salt Lake City, Utah; Butte, Montana; and Chicago, Illinois.
Popular Photography, for one, derided his images as "meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness."
Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said "it is impossible to imagine photography's recent past and overwhelmingly confusing present without his lingeringly pervasive presence."
[24] The French Journal Les Cahiers de la photographie devoted special issues 11 and 12 in 1983 to discussion of Robert Frank as a gesture of admiration for, and complicity with, his work, also to set forth his critical capacity as an artist.
[28] The second section of the four-section, 2009, SFMOMA[29] exhibition displays Frank's original application to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (which funded the primary work on The Americans project), along with vintage contact sheets, letters to photographer Walker Evans and author Jack Kerouac, and two early manuscript versions of Kerouac's introduction to the book.
Also exhibited were three collages (made from more than 115 original rough work prints) that were assembled under Frank's supervision in 2007 and 2008, revealing his intended themes as well as his first rounds of image selection.
Among his films was the 1959 Pull My Daisy, which was written and narrated by Kerouac and starred Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and others from the Beat circle.
[31] In 1960, Frank was staying in Pop artist George Segal's basement while filming The Sin of Jesus with a grant from Walter K. Gutman.
"[19] Mick Jagger reportedly told Frank, "It's a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we'll never be allowed in the country again."
[34][35] Though Frank continued to be interested in film and video, he returned to still images in the 1970s, publishing his second photographic book, The Lines of My Hand, in 1972.
[37] He remarried, to sculptor June Leaf, and in 1971, moved to the community of Mabou in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia in Canada.
[5] After his move to Nova Scotia, Canada, Frank divided his time between his home there, in a former fisherman's shack on the coast, and his Bleecker Street loft in New York.
He continued to accept eclectic assignments, however, such as photographing the 1984 Democratic National Convention, and directing music videos for artists such as New Order ("Run"), and Patti Smith ("Summer Cannibals").
[38] In 1994, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. presented the most comprehensive retrospective of Frank's work to date, entitled Moving Out.