Robert Frank

Personal

Vocation

Lifestyle

Notable

Family

Swiss-American photographer and film director, whose most notable work, the influential 1959 book, The Americans (first published in 1958 in France as Les Américains), earned him comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage. His photo Trolley - New Orleans was sold at an auction in 2013 for $663,750, the highest ever achieved price for a photograph. Among his films was the 1959 Pull My Daisy (co-directed with Alfred Leslie), which was written and narrated by Jack Kerouac and starred Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and others from the Beat circle. However, Frank's 1972 documentary of the Rolling Stones, Cocksucker Blues, is arguably his best known film. The film shows the Stones on tour, engaging in heavy drug use and group sex. In 1950, Frank married fellow artist Mary Lockspeiser, with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo. Frank and Mary separated in 1969. He remarried, to sculptor June Leaf, and in 1971, moved to the community of Mabou, Nova Scotia in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia in Canada. In 1974, tragedy struck when his daughter, Andrea, was killed in a plane crash in Tikal, Guatemala. Also around this time, his son, Pablo, was first hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Much of Frank's subsequent work dealt with the impact of the loss of both his daughter and subsequently his son, who died in an Allentown, Pennsylvania hospital in 1994. In 1995, he founded the Andrea Frank Foundation, which provides grants to artists. Frank died on 9 September 2019, aged 94, at his home in Inverness, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Link to Wikipedia biography