Assignment 3: Essay Completed

It took a little longer than I expected, but I finally got the essay in the mail to my tutor this week.  Now the wait for feedback.  With my last essay for Landscape on Andreas Gursky I was quietly confident that it was a good piece of work, I was very much into the artist and thought I had something interesting to say - my tutor agreed.

With Robert Frank I am on less secure ground.  Rather than making the process easier the vast amount of published information, in particular Sarah Greenough's "Looking In Robert Frank's The Americans", made the task very much harder.  What could I say that was not simply a precis of what was already out there, 2,500 words seems like a lot, but is in fact a very short piece of writing.  I immediately struggled with the scope of the task I had set myself and quickly realized that I could not write a meaningful essay that covered Frank's complete life and works.

My initial thoughts had been to look at The Americans and analyze how it had changed photography, a kind of before and after with a brief biography of Frank.  My own interest in photography and photographers is very much orientated around this before and after.  I have collected photobooks by Hine, Evans, Stieglitz, Adams (A), and Steichen.  They all share a careful approach to photography, technically excellent and visually correct.  After The Americans came Winogrand, Arbus, Klein, Meyerovitz, and Shore, all embracing the snapshot aesthetic and publishing volumes of work taken with small cameras often of events and stuff that crossed them in the street.  As with all transitions this is not clear cut and happened over time, but there is a distinct PF and AF in american photography.

The problem I had was that writing an essay about this would be to rehash the topic once more and what would I learn from it?  Sure there is a historical element here, but I already get that.  3 feet of bookcase are testament to the fact that I have explored these photographer's works.  I still think there is value in looking at each of these photographer's contributions and analyzing them in the context of my own thinking, but not for my essay.

In the end I decided to make this personal and look at Frank through the lens of what I could learn from his development as a photographer, what did he do to get to the point of writing The Americans.  This meant asking questions about his earlier work.  One thing was immediately apparent.  Although we refer to the young Frank at the time of publication of the Americans, he had already been working as a professional photographer for 17 years by then.  So what had he been doing for those 17 years?

This became the theme of the essay and was the first time I had really looked at how an artist developed over time versus considering the finished item of a photograph or book.  There was a risk in this approach as my essay might not be "academic" enough, however, the key was that I learned a lot by doing this, a more conventional approach to Frank would have taught me nothing.  The final result is not really the point for me here it is the process to get there.  Writing the essay took roughly 6 full days of research and development.  During that time I steeped myself in the young Frank and his early photographs.

So what were the conclusions?  I finished the essay with the following observations about Frank and what I took from his development:

• The first is to think of photographs not individually, but in relation to one another, bound together by a common narrative.  Frank showed in his early work that this narrative need not be temporal nor linear, but a body of work should have linking themes that ask to be understood by the reader.  

• The second is to consider photography in the context of other contemporary movements, artistic, but also societal, to incorporate the zeitgeist into my work.  

Hopefully my next blog entry will be job well done, but if not, another learning experience beckons.