Robert Frank, Andrea, 1975. © 2024 The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation 


Robert Frank, one of the greatest 20th Century photographers, waited until turning 100 for his retrospective at MoMA, but it was worth the wait. He is no longer here, but his work, since the 1958 bombshell of a book, The Americans, is very much present and still immensely influential. New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition called Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue is a monumental exploration of the artist’s work until his death in 2019, celebrating the centenary of Frank’s birth. 

The exhibition explores Frank’s restless experimentation across mediums - photography, films, books - and his never ending dialogues with other artists, in particular artists and writers from the Beat Generation with which he was closely associated through films like his 1959 Pull my Daisy, written and narrated by Kerouac, starring Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets. Frank also collaborated with artists from younger generations like the Rolling Stones. He made a film about them, Cosucker Blues, and shot the cover of their seminal album Exile on Main Street

The exhibition features more than 250 objects from the Museum’s collection as well as loans from private collections and from the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. MoMA will also be showing The Complete Robert Frank - Films and Videos, 1959 - 2017. 

“This exhibition offers visitors a fresh perspective on this beloved and influential artist,” said Lucy Gallun, the show’s curator. “The enormous impact of Frank’s book The Americans meant that he is often remembered as a solo photographer on a road trip, a Swiss artist making pictures of an America that he traversed as an outsider. And yet, in the six decades that followed, Frank continually forged new paths in his work, often in direct artistic conversation with others, and these contributions warrant closer attention. The pictures, films, and books he made in these years are evidence of Frank’s ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life, at once searing and tender.” 

Robert Frank’s The Americans, was so influential that some critics even compared it to de Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America. Published in 1958, The Americans was a completely revolutionary look at America at the end of the Eisenhower era. Thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank traveled for 2 years all across the country and all strata of society, taking some 28,000 pictures - but only 83 were selected for the book -  to create a very different portrait of America which shocked many Americans. 


Robert Frank, Sick of Goodbyes, 1978. ©The June Leaf ad Robert Frank Foundation

The MoMA exhibition is organized chronologically and is focused primarily on Robert Frank’s dialogue with and influence from other artists. The show highlights how the photographer was as much an experimenter and how Frank’s freedom of spirit liberated many young artists. In a conversation with curator Lucy Gallun, artist Dayanita Singh recounts how discovering Frank’s The Lines of my Hand completely changed the course of her life. “I knew it was a life changing moment,” Singh tells Lucy Gallun, “and I understood how a book can change your life. That impact of Robert Frank never went away.” That’s exactly Robert Frank’s legacy, 62 years after his appearing on the scene with such a bang. His influence never went away.

~Jean-Sébastien Stehli


Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Until January 11, 2025. moma.org