Robert Frank's Scrapbook Footage, 1970–2006
You open the door and you go in and climb out the window and you see something else.
Super 8, 16mm film, and video transferred to HD video (six-channel projection, color and black and white, sound). Like many artists, Frank kept diaries and scrapbooks, which provide a window into his interior life. Similarly, the raw footage used in this installation sheds new light on Frank’s artistic process, stitched together by Israel and Bingham in a way that evokes his restless gaze and declamatory voice, at once comical and melancholy. He journeys between his homes in New York and Nova Scotia; the open roads of the United States and Canada; and urban landscapes, including those of Beirut, Cairo, Moscow, and his native Switzerland. Frank makes timeless the most fleeting of pleasures: a warm bath and a steaming tea kettle, a glimpse of his wife June Leaf in her studio, or the play of sunlight on his hand. — Museum of Modern Art
