A Man Entering America With a Camera

Robert Frank at 100: in the last years of his life, it seemed a plausible enough prospect.

- Brian Dillon

So many great, mid-20th-century photographers appear to have been blessed with a more or less productive longevity, not quite explained by active lives spent hefting around camera equipment. For a long time, it was possible to be surprised that some legend of the medium was still going, perhaps still making work, or had died only recently, within what felt like the compass of the contemporary. Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein, Helen Levitt and Irving Penn all lived into their 90s, dying in a new century whose vantage made their best-known images seem like monuments we walk past every day. We might say the same about Frank, who died in 2019, aged 94, six decades after the publication of his most famous work. Except that Frank had long ago killed off the young photographer who made The Americans (1958), and become several different artists instead.