In Memory of Robert Frank
Couple. Greenwich Village / 2019 — Thomas Sayers Ellis
I first heard the name Robert Frank while taking a portrait photo of Allen Ginsberg. He interrupted my shot and said, "My new Photography Guru Robert Frank told me to always include the head and the hands in the picture because they are both always naked."
Robert Frank knew what so many of us take years, through art or life, to discover: that 20/20 Vision (which leads to 20/20 thinking and 20/20 feeling) is a vast handicap and nowhere near the realm of perfect expression which is, in this realm, imperfect seeing or rather an isolated glance colored by the mood of the moment. The tones in Frank’s photograph controlled time itself and Frank was capable of writing with light and darkness, equally. It was as if he never separated them.
I have never seen a single mechanical mood in any of his images but I did see him, often, eliminate the split-second boundary between joy and pain as evident in “Couple / Paris / 1952." In that image there is the eyes-closed-ecstasy of public togetherness, as the couple sits in a moving go-cart rather than the clichéd public bench as was common in most photographs of the day.
Couple / Paris / 1952 — Robert Frank
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.