Life Dances On

This exhibition catalogue provides new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesserknown aspects of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank''s expansive career by delving into the extraordinarily multifaceted six decades that followed Frank''s landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019. In the six decades that followed the landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019, the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank maintained an extraordinarily multifaceted practice informed by perpetual experimentation and collaborations across various mediums. Frank 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, Frank continually forged new paths in his work, often in direct artistic conversation with others, in a ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life. Coinciding with the centennial of his birth and taking its name from the artist''s 1980 film, Life Dances On explores Frank''s artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities. Featuring photographs, films, books, and archival materials, this richly layered publication includes excerpts from an oral history project undertaken for his centennial, and a special section devoted to his ''scrapbook footage,'' which provides readers with previously unavailable reflections from Frank himself.

Auteur
Lucy Gallun is a Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Kaitlin Booher is a Newhall Curatorial Fellow and curatorial assistant in the Department of Photography, MoMA.

Sarah Greenough is Senior Curator and Head of the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Contenu
Front matter
Introductory essay by Lucy Gallun (1,500 words)
Essay by Lucy Gallun (4,000 words) on the notion of place as portrait, considering Frank's relationship to the community and landscape of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he moved in 1970.
Essay by Sarah Greenough (4,000 words) on Frank's letters and correspondence, and their intersection with his work.
Essay by Kaitlin Booher (3,000 words) on Frank's relationships with the group he calls the 10th Street Artists and other related New York artist communities.
Plate section with excerpts from an oral history project
Excerpts from Scrapbook Footage compiled by Laura Israel, with an introduction by Josh Siegel