Hilton Als Staff writer There’s a built-in elegiac quality to the work of Robert Frank; indeed, one could say the same about a lot of photography—that the document exists because of what the photographer didn’t want to forget. But Frank’s genius was in knowing that life moves on, even if we want to stop it, or aspects of it, in a frame. (“I think of myself, standing in a world that is never standing still,” he once said.
) His landmark work, “The Americans,” was not only an outsider’s view of the world—Frank was born in Zurich, in 1924, and, despite living much of his life in New York after 1947, never entirely lost his accent—it was an outsider’s view of photography: that it could do so much more than had previously been tried. It’s wild to think that this is his first retrospective at MOMA , given that his interest in form and volition is an ethos that the museum generally celebrates. But the curator Lucy Gallun is so full of love for Frank’s various turns as a great and sometimes not-so-great creator that you can’t get mad.
The exhibition “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” (through Jan. 11) starts off with Frank’s earliest work in black-and-white photography and moves through his turns as bookmaker, diarist, and filmmaker with ease—everything is well placed and considered—without being too brief, or condescending. Although his works as a self-consciously “visual” artist fall flat—he wasn’t a good painter—it’s still.