has just made the sharpest possible
left turn at a three-way stop.
If the driver is meant to be
the photographer himself,
(the drive along the coast being his specific memory),
symbolically and literally he is exiting his subject.
The vehicle’s back lights, twin opaque red circles,
seem to be mutely flaring.
You can almost feel the heat cranked up
inside, the drizzly chill of the air.
You can almost hear, on the dashboard radio,
Otis Redding’s rough-hewn plaintive,
“… it’s raining in my heart.”
Such dreams of observing—
or living “inside”—Robert Frank’s
Cape Breton photographs have,
over the years, recurred quite frequently,
nights in a row sometimes:
a gazetteer of my sleeping hours,
whenever I sleep in Cape Breton.
Of this particular photograph, Christoph Ribbat,
in the book Hold Still–Keep Going,
writes, “… we owe it to Robert Frank’s works on Nova
Scotia that nature was given a different visual language.
In clear distinction to the exacting
professional landscape photographers,
he doesn’t treat nature
as a space in need of aesthetic domination.
Instead, he shows it as an uncertain
dreamlike sphere of memory.”
Born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1924 to Jewish parents, Frank came to maturity during World War II. While his mother was Swiss, Frank, like his father, was a German citizen. Although relatively safe and prosperous, the family lived in fear that Hitler might invade Switzerland. (Frank became a Swiss citizen in 1945, shortly before the end of the war.) This early experience undoubtedly contributed to Frank’s tendency to observe society from a distance.
7:00 a.m. After coffee and buttered toast,
I was actually driving my dilapidated Datsun pick-up
through what I call “Robert Frank Territory.”
I continued on out along a similar headland
in quite similar misty light
as in “The Mail Box at the Road to Findlay Point,”
my windshield absorbing
the exact same hue.
On the front seat, the map drawn for me
by the hostel’s proprietor.
Actually, she had drawn an insert map in pencil,
on the official map I had purchased at the gas station.
Anyway, there I was
meandering toward Finlay Point.
For years now, this is how it has been;
on late autumn visits to Cape Breton—in my mind
I have to work my way through
certain of Robert Frank’s photographs
in order to catch up to the present.
Is this a form of life imitating art?
I don’t know and don’t care, really.
The mental process now seems inevitable;
and I suppose I have come to value it
like no other.
12:30 p.m. Lunch in Red Shoes pub
in Mabou (which displays pairs of red
shoes in the window). On a napkin
I wrote a few of Robert Frank’s
melancholic aphorisms
which he sometimes scrawls
on his photographs: “Hold still—keep going,”
“Life dances on …,”
“Look out for hope,”
born, it seems to me, of sorrow and hope,
grief and reprieve from grief.
It is a biographical fact that Mr. Frank
and his first wife, Mary,
lost two children, daughter Andrea in a plane accident
and son Pablo, a different path he took.
It is a cosmically stupid
assertion that “time heals all”
(it is the opposite of wisdom),
it heals some things,
but a certain kind of experience
but a certain kind of experience
exacts more pain as time passes
simply because it has become
so full (and tenaciously) resident
in one’s heart and mind.
Robert Frank has made nearly unbearable—
and singularly incomparable—
photographs containing the oldest,
most fundamental human paradox,
within a single frame
In 1970, after separating from Mary Frank, Robert Frank bought a house in Mabou, Nova Scotia, with the artist June Leaf. The raw, strong work he made there was, is, a demonstration of how far a photograph can stretch, how much it can include, once it gives up the idea of including it all, once it accepts that it isn’t going to break on through to some universal truth.
Salman Rushdie
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
l p.m. I drove from Mabou to Whale Cove.
Wind high. White caps.
(“White horses on the sea,” as they say.)
The horseshoe-shaped beach. The rock jetty.
The wharf gulls vigilant
toward the fishing schedule.
They sight the boats
and gather en masse
for handouts.
In September 1975, I lived a few weeks
in Whale Cove while trying to recover
from walking pneumonia.
Since childhood I have been susceptible
to respiratory attacks of every stripe,
and in Whale Cove my coughing
in the few neighboring restaurants
and churches I frequented
soon became legend.
My lungs ambushed with knifing spasms.
It must have been alarming to witness.
I was the village’s coughing freak. (It was
entirely understandable, but nonetheless
humiliating, to have a child come out and ask me
to leave church premises,
a disturber of the peace,
even though I’d merely stopped by to admire
the oratory prowess of the minister, had
in fact stood outside listening in through a
slightly opened window.)
All sorts of home remedies were suggested;
I tried some to good effect.
Dressed in winter bundling,
I took a walk each morning,
got exhausted in a few minutes,
sat on a patch of beach grass, wheezing,
dozing off, back against the wind-sculpted sand cliff,
like a beached walrus
taking in the sun.
I “took the waters”
only by looking at the cold sea.
2 p.m. I sat in a small
shop/restaurant, a few scattered tables,
actually, in Whale Cove,
and thought about the 1975 photograph
“Andrea,”
by Robert Frank,
which has much writing on it,
and a portrait of Andrea
in its upper-left panel,
who has the most naturally stunning smile.
Read left to right, the next panel
suddenly evokes, if you will,
landscape without daughter,
and the entire nine-paneled work
suggests how the mind in turn
illuminates and blanks,
because four of the panels
contain grainy emptiness.
That second panel scripts a piercing
epitaph, “for my daughter Andrea who died in
an Airplane crash in TICAL in Guatemala
on Dec. 23. Last year. She was 21 and she lived
in this house and I think of Andrea every DAY.”
The house is depicted in the centermost panel
&nbs
p; and again in the last panel, lower right
in the photograph.
Frank continued to experiment with multiple images, adding objects, notes, and scraps of paper to achieve a sense of intimacy in structure, form, and content…. In one of his most impassioned statements, Frank roughly pasted several images on cardboard, adding layers of black, peeling paint, obscuring and defacing the overall picture. It was as if he was using the surface of the photograph as a palette on which to inscribe his pain.
Philip Brookman
Robert Frank: Moving Out
3:30 p.m. I drove to Chimney Corner
and again sat by the sea.
A seal bobbed up its head, observed me,
swam a ways to my left, dove, surfaced again;
it went like that for half an hour.
Gulls, of course. Thermos of coffee.
It appeared as if half the horizon
was filled with rain clouds, the other half empty.
A block of gray-black, a block of blue. The
meshing into the blue.
Wet chill wind.
(Once, on a beach on Prince Edward Island,
an ornithologist
friend and I stood right where the rain ended.
It has to end somewhere, naturally;
it just was the oddest thing, for a few moments to be
able to reside at that exact margin, step in and out of
the rain at whim, like walking through a curtain.)
In cinematic narration,
as in literature, a “flashback,”
of course, delays Time,
doubles Time’s presence,
folds the past into the present.
Robert Frank sets up frames within frames.
This on occasion has the effect of a “flashback.”
The frames also isolate parts of a landscape,
as if particular emotions—or memories—reside there.
Sitting at Chimney Corner, I closed my eyes
and envisioned Robert Frank’s winter collage
constructed in Mabou, 1979, I think simply titled
“Mabou.” It consists of six panels.
Each panel displays an upright wooden frame.
The first panel (read left to right), shot from below
the house, has a big wooden frame
inside of which is a telephone pole
and the house itself;
June Leaf stands just outside this frame,
dressed in a dark overcoat, scarf, beret, gazing out.
The second panel is a rocky snowscape with fir trees
and a slope, partially inside a wooden frame
(which “doubles” the geography).
It has the word YESTERDAY
at the bottom, by definition connoting a “flashback.”
The next panel’s interior wooden frame holds
nine complete or partial rectangles formed by a wire fence;
through the surface of the complete photograph,
through the wooden frame,
through the wire rectangles,
the eye finally reaches the sea and the sea’s horizon.
It feels like a grueling journey to get to the sea,
almost (because of the fence, I think) trespassing—
(perhaps it is better to take in nature at a distance).
The first panel on the second row
exhibits a kind of sculpture—a pickax lain
atop a chopping block—inside the upright wooden frame,
with the sea in the background.
What is written in this panel—FIRE TO THE SOUTH—
might well have chronicled
an actual event, a forest fire, maybe;
at any rate, it takes notice of the world outside Mabou.
The second panel in the second row contains
only about half of a wooden frame;
the landscape inside and outside this frame
holds no people, and snow quilting
the distant headland
is starkly bright compared to the dingier snow
of the foreground.
In the last panel, a man (perhaps a neighbor) stands
frozen like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz,
except wearing a black jacket,
one mittened hand clutching
the wooden frame itself, as if holding it up—
part of the “surface” inside this frame
has been painted densely dark and shaped
like a tornado or water spout,
as if it is the immediate condition at sea.
Across a black-streaked sky is written,
TO THE EAST AMERICA,
which generally locates the photograph
geographically. Vague, almost hallucinatory
fence posts are lined up along
what possibly is a cliff, the sea in the background.
I love the spaces between these fence posts,
each which appears placed an equal distance from the next.
The sea resides between posts.
After ten years of intense work in filmmaking, Frank returned to still photography in the early 1970s. He fell back on his earlier method of expression for a variety of reasons. In 1972, at the instigation of Kazuhito Motomura and Toshio Hataya [two Japanese publishers], he published a very personal, retrospective examination of his life entitled The Lines of My Hand…. This book undoubtedly rekindled his interest in his past work and the process of photography in general. In addition, in 1970 Frank and June Leaf, a painter whom he would marry in 1975, bought land in Mabou, Nova Scotia, and that more isolated existence also encouraged a more solitary method of making art. But more than anything else it was the sudden death in 1974 of his twenty-year-old daughter Andrea, coupled with the earlier disappearance and presumed death of his good friend and fellow filmmaker Danny Seymour, that propelled his return to still photography…. Although he did make films that embodied his grief, still photographs became his most immediate and direct means to try “to show how it feels to be alive.”
Sarah Greenough
Robert Frank: Moving Out
6 p.m., almost dark. I drove to Baddeck,
on the St. Andrews Channel, to use
a bathroom, purchase some cleaning solution
for my binoculars, find a place for dinner.
Minimal necessities and errands of an unhurried day.
In a shop window, I saw an old Smith-Corona manual
typewriter. It was not for sale, it was part of the
window dressing.
Any number of old-fashioned women’s and men’s hats
were on display, and the ornately lettered sign
announced hats are back!
The entire diorama was supposed to evoke the WWII era.
There was a poster warning loose lips sink ships.
(An American poster, I think.)
On the poster, a lithe woman wearing a hat
leaned in to whisper into a man’s ear;
he was dressed in a gray suit
and held a swastika-headed cane behind his back.
A schedule of troop transports floated
in the black space at the upper right,
as if it was the woman’s thought-balloon.
(How had she obtained such secret information?
She looked to be a proper woman,
whereas he was unmistakably seedy,
had a malevolent grimace.)
At the bottom right, in red block lettering,
it read: the devil has ears.
Scrolling from the typewriter
was a yellowed sheet of paper
on which someone (perhaps the shop owner)
had begun a letter. There was only the date,
July 8, 1944,
and the salutation, Dear Mom and Dad.
In my Robert Frank frame-of-mind, it was
the typewriter
that most stood out.
It reminded me of my favorite of his photographs,
“FEAR—NO FEAR, Mabou, Nova Scotia, 1987”
It is idiotic and entirely beside the point
to use the word favorite when referring
to an artist’s work so powerful in its range of emotion
and subject.
However, that is my opinion: “FEAR—NO FEAR”
is my favorite. (I can’t get it out of my mind.)
Toward “FEAR—NO FEAR”
I delegate a separate (almost spiritual) consideration,
or it could be, crudely, acquisition fever.
“FEAR—NO FEAR” is a kind of vertical triptych.
In each panel is a typewriter (the same manual typewriter)
situated on a desk at a window.
The top and bottom frames contain writing,
not the middle.
You can either read it top to bottom (FEAR—NO FEAR)
or bottom to top (NO FEAR—FEAR), depending, I
suppose, on one’s existential condition, and because such
is life, that either could be the order
in which a person confronts
(or fails to) any given task or memory, on any given day.
This has always struck me as a photograph about
the daily working life of the artist.
In each frame, the typewriter carriage,
with its rolled-in piece of typing paper,
is at different positions on the horizontal.
A typewriter.
A typewriter in front of a landscape.
The romance of writing, unless one is wealthy,
still has a utilitarian reality.
It is how to make a living.
It requires tools of the trade,
including the imagination.
Add nostalgia to the mix, because,
as we know, the manual typewriter
has become a relic.
(A recording of a clacking
manual typewriter, I’m told,
is in the “sound archive” in Washington, D.C.)
Looking at the Mabou pictures, I remembered these lines of Virginia Woolf: A masterpiece is not the result of a sudden inspiration but the product of a lifetime of thought.
Salman Rushdie
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
9 p.m., driving back to Mabou. Clear, black sky,
a zillion stars and a full moon.
Taking the Bluenose ferry from Maine
to Nova Scotia one summer, I said to a fellow
passenger, who physically resembled Peter Lorre,
“There’s a full moon, you’ll be able to read a book
on deck by it.” He bet me ten dollars Canadian against.