Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue

This exhibition catalogue provides new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesserknown aspects of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank’s expansive career by delving into the extraordinarily multifaceted six decades that followed Frank’s landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019.

In the six decades that followed the landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019, the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank maintained an extraordinarily multifaceted practice informed by perpetual experimentation and collaborations across various mediums. Frank is often remembered as a solo photographer on a road trip, a Swiss artist making pictures of an America that he traversed as an outsider. And yet, Frank continually forged new paths in his work, often in direct artistic conversation with others, in a ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life.

Coinciding with the centennial of his birth and taking its name from the artist’s 1980 film, Life Dances On explores Frank’s artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities. Featuring photographs, films, books, and archival materials, this richly layered publication includes excerpts from an oral history project undertaken for his centennial, and a special section devoted to his “scrapbook footage,” which provides readers with previously unavailable reflections from Frank himself.

Review

['Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue'] as eloquent a case as can be made for [Robert Frank's] later art, often left in the shade by what came before.--Arthur Lubow "The New York Times"

[A] new book that looks at Frank's contributions to the art world beyond photography.--Donny Bajohr "Smithsonian Magazine"

[The] exhibition provides new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesser-known aspects of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank's expansive career.-- "The Eye of Photography"

[This exhibition] shows how the interplay between still and moving images is at the core of Frank's art. Cinematic techniques including collage, serial imagery, and the layering of text and image abound in his photography after 'The Americans.'--David Schwartz "MUBI Notebook"

Consistently surprising and abundantly interesting.--Mark Feeney "The Boston Globe"

Frank came to find that [the photo editing process was] morally compromised. In his view, painting was additive, photography subtractive, a mere matter of plucking one or two items from the groaning smorgasbord of everything the eye could see. The show is the heartbreaking record of his attempt to cope with that anti-epiphany.--Ariella Budick "The Financial Times"

It's an important show, and a wonderful way to be reminded that making art depends on a kind of restless curiosity, and openness.--Hilton Als "The New Yorker"

MoMA's centennial exhibition dedicated to Robert Frank challenges the narrow view of reducing the photographer's oeuvre to his seminal work, 'The Americans.' The exhibition [...] counters the cult-like focus to spotlight his later works and his lesser-known avant-garde filmmaking career.--Guenola Pellen "Blind Magazine"

The 'Swiss, unobtrusive, nice' photographer had far more to capture than what was in the pages of 'The Americans' ...' Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue' highlights the work made in the decades that followed Frank's acclaimed book.--Zack Hauptman "Air Mail"

The vast majority of Frank's varied output in photography, film, and performance, and his participation in the electric Lower Manhattan scene of the 1960s, happened after The Americans. But those genre-bending collaborations are lesser known, an imbalance that the Museum of Modern Art's current show 'Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue' seeks to correct.--Ian Bourland "Aperture"

Touching.--Christopher Borelli "The Chicago Tribune"

About the Author

Lucy Gallun is a Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Kaitlin Booher is a Newhall Curatorial Fellow and curatorial assistant in the Department of Photography, MoMA.

Sarah Greenough is Senior Curator and Head of the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.