My Home In Photos: Inspired By Robert Frank

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

— Robert Frank

Robert Frank was a Swiss emigré who moved to New York City at 23 years old with hopes of finding work as a photographer. And as luck would have it, one of the most influential fashion magazines in the world, Harper’s Bazaar, hired him the very same year— 1947.

Frank soon branched beyond print journalism, driving across the country on a grant from the Guggenheim Museum, taking photos of middle America in the 1950s with attention to racial segregation in the south. His book from the trip —The Americans— now rests in the pantheon of U.S. documentary photography.

Frank saw life as it was and captured it in that moment. If the moment he saw passed before he could take a picture, he let it go. Life is full of art, happening all the time, everywhere. It’s all down to the effort of the artist to notice, capture, preserve, and share these moments.

Art is everything.

Art is everything.

Art is everything.

Art is imitation of…?

Frank wrote these words on a collage of photos he put together of his second wife. It was one of his many works displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a special exhibit on him I saw yesterday.

Frank inspired me to see art in my life, all the time. Life is art. It’s about the artist who cares to look, capture, preserve, and share. That’s being an artist.

Photo tips from Frank:

The first photo is usually the best one.
If you’re planning a photo road-trip across the U.S., stay south — more people hang around outside.
Life is art. Take photos that reflect life.

In his later years, Frank took lots of film of everyday objects and small scenes inside his home. This inspired me (plus a little weed) to take some photos of my own.

So here are shots from inside my fifth-floor walk-up in the Upper West Side tonight, Thursday, Nov. 21.