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To wrap up from last time on late work by Robert Frank, he photographs his friends at ease together. Others turn their camera on him, like Joan Lyons and Danny Lyon.

His most obvious collaborations, though, were on films, starting in 1959 with Pull My Daisy He conceived it together with Alfred Leslie, with a script by Jack Kerouac, the author of On the Road. (Kerouac also supplies the voice-over narration.) It works through their shared ambivalence about their own creative past, with (as I put it in another past review), an undercurrent of humor and disturbance that art cannot resolve. It also moves between images of family life and the arts.

Some have found it formless, which misses its narrative, but also misses the point. It celebrates the lives of artists, including their spiritual life, but art that makes things up on the spot on the spot. And if it still seems formless, just wait till you see Frank’s other films. (MoMA gives them monitors rather than rooms to themselves.) Just wait, too, till you see the rest of his photography. He pops over to Coney Island for a shoot, but this will be one long roller-coaster of a ride.

His most persistent collaborator was his second wife, June Leaf, and their greatest collaboration their move from New York. They observe much the same scenes at Cape Breton, Frank in photography and Leaf on paper. She gives acrylic and ink the translucency of watercolor—to capture the light, but also to preserve in paint the spontaneity of drawing. She renders a hand, too, perhaps Frank’s own mark. They turn their thoughts most, though, to the space of a home. In years ahead, light can still penetrate, but little else.

They differ in one thing: where Leaf’s scenes are otherwise empty, Frank is still asking his neighbors how they live. He seems happy to have discovered Mabou, a small town on the Cape where he can know pretty much everyone. They and their homes look ramshackle and improvised. One seems to be sinking halfway into the sea. A Mabou Winter is just a half-covered eye.

Walker Evans, long a friend and advisor, stops by to take a look around. For MoMA, it is just one more sign of collaboration. Even fans have mostly given up on Frank after The Americans, and the curators, Joshua Siegel and Lucy Gallon, hope to change that. Something, though, has changed for good. There is no getting around that images become closer and closer to throwaways, much like the “scrapbook.” Still, Frank knew the pain of throwing things away.

What remains is a portrait of loss. His two children died young, his daughter very young, and he himself retreats further and further within. He had always worked on the cheap, but now he trades his Leica for Polaroids—as he put it, “to strengthen the feeling.” Life Dances On . . ., the 1980 print that lends the show its title, seems more and more a bitter hope. Leaf’s absences of life become prophetic, and a typewriter rests untouched. An interior becomes bare walls and a dusty square of light.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on late work by Robert Frank, that photograph of, just maybe, collaborators, should tell you something. They have been hanging out a long time now, and no one would dream of telling them how to pose.

Still, one appears behind the rest, on-screen or in a print, eager to join them but not altogether there. A couple hugs, but Frank stands apart at far right. He looks older as well, just short of sixty, with white hair and a scraggly beard. Hand-lettered labels below each person make them look like perps in police custody.

Frank was always restless. He had to hit the road for The Americans, and it testifies to a restless America. I caught up with him at the Met in 2010—and do check out my review then, which I would not dream of repeating. The series makes the perfect contrast to “America by Car” by Lee Friedlander, for no one had his feet on the ground as much as Frank. He stuck to the people he met and the symbols they embrace, in unsettled compositions. He was not going to wait around for photography’s “decisive moment.”

The book itself remained unsettled until practically the day of publication (in 1957 in Paris). Frank kept returning to his contact prints, circling and changing his choices. MoMA has it right when it includes contact prints among other discoveries, and it salvages film that he never released, too, as “scrapbook footage” in the basement theater. It boasts of its truth to Frank’s intentions by showing them in their entirety, but that has it wrong. He made his selections. He just kept changing his mind.

Born in 1924, he left Switzerland as a restless young man, and he could not sit still on his return to New York after The Americans. Sure, he could find a seat on the bus, but only to cross the city much as he had crossed the country—and to observe what he could from a window. From the Bus opens the show at MoMA, and it can be hard to know who on the street has made a decisive, theatrical turn and who has momentarily lost his way. Frank heads downtown soon after to what he could call home, east of the Village. He casts himself in a postwar scene that is giving America its integrity and its life. He still takes on commercial work, and MoMA includes a page from Mademoiselle, but with the freedom to say no.

He photographs artists, an incredibly young James Baldwin, and Allen Ginsberg, all of them friends. He could see Willem de Kooning at work from out his window, but he would rather photograph him up close. He spends an extended period with the Rolling Stones for what became his best-known group portrait. Naturally it is the period of Exile on Main Street. Still, he shies away from telling a story about psychology, creativity, and exile. He shoots painters without a brush in hand, Baldwin and Ginsberg without a typewriter.

Nor is he making a political statement. He has room even for a conservative icon, William F. Buckley. He must have known his own conflicting feelings about America. He had to keep moving, but he distrusted his adopted country’s restless spirit. To him it was the spirit of capitalism. It was time he refused to play the lone genius—a time for collaboration, and I continue next time with exactly that.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Are These Men Collaborators? It was 1983, and Joan Lyons posed the question in her title to a print. Robert Frank, among those posing for the camera, must have wondered as well. Among the greatest American photographers ever, was he fated to go it alone?

He must have wondered how much it was worth collaborating from the moment he arrived in New York in 1947, as a Jew from Switzerland. Not even a neutral nation could protect his family and community from the Nazis. He found work almost instantly, in fashion photography, first for Harper’s Bazaar—but was that itself a collaboration, with editors and professional models, or just a reminder of everything he mistrusted about America? He left almost as quickly for the road, for what became The Americans in 1958. It gave a face to Americans like no other work in photography, but were they, too, collaborators, or was Frank that much more in exile? Viewers ever since have wondered if this was their America, too.

Now MoMA picks up the story, with photography and film from the rest of his life, through January 11. It follows him through two marriages, both to artists, and to New York in the excitement of Beat poetry and abstract art—and with an emphasis on collaboration every step of the way. It takes him and his family to Nova Scotia, where he moved part time in 1970. He loved not just sky and sea, but even more his new neighbors. By his death in 2019, his circle had shrunk, as he spent more and more time not just in Cape Breton, but in his house alone. MoMA sees a turn after The Americans to work with others, but its poignancy may lie instead in how much he had to leave behind. Still, as the show’s title has it, “Life Dances On,” and I get started in earnest with an extra post tomorrow.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

There is nothing wrong with an empty table in a diner. The waiter has set it for customers, and who knows but it is about to receive them.

Jeff Brouws, for all I know, may have asked them to wait while he snaps a photo. And if salt, pepper, cream, and ketchup are not your idea of sophisticated tastes, that is what diners then were for. You may still think of them as creature comforts. If the standard-issue black ashtray would look out of place today and a bit of a turn-off, this was the early 1990s, and Brouws often leaves hints of time and place in the most innocuous of settings.

There is nothing wrong either with a single car in an otherwise empty lot. An employee at the mall might have been early getting in or late getting home. Americans work hard, right? Yet it can only be a portrait of its time and of emptiness, much like the diner. Blame Joe Biden if you like for the American unease that could easily have turned the election to Donald F. Trump, or blame the media and right-wing propaganda in a time of unprecedented prosperity. Brouws, though, knew an earlier time when crime had only begun to fall and unease was anyone’s right. He, in turn, can take credit for photographing it. He can take even more for seeming to do so without really trying, at Robert Mann through December 6.

You may still think of malls as creature comforts, too, even as they fall victim of e-commerce. Just do so at your own risk. And Brouws photographs a world of impulse buying, even as impulsive acts lead to disaster. A car stands trapped in its own smoke and fire on the highway. The neon glow of a motel at night looks frighteningly cold. Could this have been so cold and so dangerous a time?

It could be almost anything. Back in Chelsea after the pandemic, the gallery calls the show “Just About Everything, Someplace Else,” after two photographs of spray-painted walls. The photographer, it says, has an eye for just about everything, but there is always that unsettling someplace else. He crosses America to find it, much like Robert Frank or Lee Friedlander. Unlike them, he works in color. He must relish the darkness of smoke and the brightness of fire, all but ordering you not to look away.

Unlike them, too, he all but omits people. Frank had his landmark with The Americans, but here Americans are present by what they leave behind. Bars and storefronts are at least partly boarded up, but you may still look inside to see what they were selling. With luck, the driver and passengers escaped a burning wreck. Come to think of it, a worker at the mall would probably claim a spot closer to the stores, not dead center. The car really could be abandoned, or it could take that much more care for its place.

Regardless, the work speaks of its time, between spray paint as urban blight and as entering the museum. If those slogans are graffiti, they are neatly executed. There may be tragedy on the highway, but also comedy in a car at a forty-five degree angle to an untended field. There may be beauty in a jazz singer and her unheard melodies. Titles spell out the location of each one. They want you to remember everything and something else.

From the very start, LaToya Ruby Frazier stepped outside the New York art scene. As a young artist, she returned to her family home in the Rust Belt. She photographed herself as one of three generations of women, as she puts it, “unified by illness” but the illness extends poignantly to race, gender, and poverty in America—and it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.

For Frazier, the decline of the Rust Belt can only be a family affair. Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, where Andrew Carnegie opened his first steel mill, she knows the people it employed, the jobs lost, and the desolation it brought to water, land, and air. Her mother had life-saving surgery at Braddock Hospital and still shows its scars. Her grandmother spent her failing days there, looking ever so smaller than her pathetic hospital bed. Frazier photographed both encounters with life and death for The Notion of Family, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013, the series that occupied the first fourteen years of her adult life. And she still calls Braddock home.

Yet her notion of family has changed. More than ten years later, it extends to an entire city seen from above, where family and loss are only implicit but no less real. It extends, too, to other places where workers fight for their jobs and their very lives. She wants to give every loss a face and every face a voice, and photography itself has given way to photo essays, with personal accounts twice over, in images and text. She calls her midcareer retrospective “Monuments of Solidarity,” and it ends with words alone, at MoMA through September 7. Could, though, monuments overwhelm the artistry and solidarity the individual?

When White Columns presented “Monuments for the USA” some years ago, one had to expect an uneasy mix of patriotism and irony, and the group show delivered both. LaToya Ruby Frazier is interested in neither one. She accommodates many narratives and takes everything seriously. What begins as the story of black women “united in our illnesses” becomes first a town’s sickness and then a wider family. Auto workers in Ohio in 2019 include men and women, black and white, and their testimonies as well. Just past the exhibition’s exit, Frazier sings “Solidarity Forever,” the union anthem, to her own accompaniment on guitar.

This is not just about her. When Frazier began, family placed her among three generations, and their resilience stopped well short of boasting. In photos alongside her mother, they seem to share one set of eyes and lips. Yet shadows divide them, and her grandmother’s refuse, including a Pall Mall carton, litters the carpet. She was not yet thirty when she appeared among the emerging artists of “Greater New York” in 2010 and, as the family’s youngest, still coming to be. She returned in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and with “The Notion of Family” in Brooklyn, and I leave a fuller account of how much it moved me to the longer version of this review, with my report back then.

Still, things looked different from the moment she looked out and up. She could see the hospital, closed in 2010, in ruins and the view from a helicopter of a polluted river. She could see the town’s welcoming sign sponsored by a pest-control company and ads for Levis that took blue jeans and Braddock as the real America. If, as the ads read, “everybody’s work is equally important,” where are the black and women’s faces? A video in collaboration with Liz Magic Laser asks just that. It was time to head elsewhere.

In Flint Is Family, ending in 2020, families cling to their uncertain supplies of fresh water, and a mother and child leave for Mississippi. They might have needed the health-care workers in More Than Conquerors, which adds the last missing elements, photo essays. Workers pose for a picture and supply plenty of words, more than anyone is likely to read. Mounted on large steel frames, they become an installation. The health-care workers, in Baltimore, speak of inequality in opportunity for them and access to care for others. The auto workers in Ohio lament the last Chevy Cruze and what it means for them. They identify so much with their work that a worker crawls under the very last car to record its serial number.

The workers resist to the last, through their union, and Frazier shares their desperate optimism. She lays out the frames from Ohio in one long row, painted an industrial red, like an auto body run wild. “It is incumbent upon me to resist,” she says, “one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time.” It is getting harder, though, and the show ends with A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta, a migrant labor camp. The artist’s geography has left family and steel far behind. If you sense a collision in priorities between environmental degradation and job loss, Frazier is testifying to needs, not to a policy agenda.

The words of others are also her answer to the weight of the monumental. True, she is less and less vulnerable and closer and closer to a lecture, but “all I’m doing,” she says, “is showing up as a vessel.” On the Making of Steel in 2017 collaborated in its photography as well. Sandra Gould Ford, a steel worker who was losing her own job, takes up the camera. The curators, Roxana Marcoci wth Caitlin Ryan and Antoinette D. Roberts, give it an oval room under changing red light, to simulate the night sky that still overlooks it all. The overflow of words and the accompanying portraits, little more than selfies, are deadening nonetheless. Frazier has come a long way from the poignancy of the young photographer’s art, her stories, her family, and her illness.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.