By Robert Frank

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Rest in photography, Robert Frank

Martino Pietropoli
3 min readSep 11, 2019

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Robert Frank died yesterday. If I know something about photography I owe it to him. He certainly taught me the difference between a good photo and a beautiful photo.

Today I was talking to some friends and I discovered they had never heard of him before, for at least two reasons: because Frank had almost stopped photographing in the 1960s — devoting himself to directing — because Frank is the perfect example of a not-so-popular but incredibly influential artist.

It’s the paradox of popularity vs influence: you can be popular and not influence anything culturally, or be unknown and influence the culture of decades to come.

Frank was certainly popular among photographers but the influence he had on the broad visual vocabulary was really powerful. His message has been so strong that today, because of him, “dirty and realistic” photography is accepted. Even if not for the most part, we owe him a lot.

I remember when I looked at his famous “The Americans” book for the first time, many years ago. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t even like it, maybe because my visual literacy was stuck at the concept of beauty. I didn’t find any beautiful pictures in that book: all I saw were grainy, technically questionable, edgy photos, often composed up to the point of visual collapse, being therefore unstable, even annoying.

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Martino Pietropoli
Martino Pietropoli

Written by Martino Pietropoli

Architect, photographer, illustrator, writer. L’Indice Totale, The Fluxus and I Love Podcasts, co-founder @ RunLovers | -> http://www.martinopietropoli.com

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