Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
I hate to be photographed. I can’t stand to be pinned in front of a camera. I do that to people. I don’t like it done to me.
[Taking photographs is] almost embarrassing, everyone does it, after all. And everyone has the pictures in their head already anyway, all more or less the same.
(2002)
You can photograph anything now.
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.
It’s nice how film survives. It’s not the way photographs are. It’s still alive. A photograph is just a memory.
I prefer to work on the edge, not the middle of the road. I am looking for chaos.
I had never traveled through the country. I saw something that was hidden and threatening. It is important to see what is invisible to others. I felt no tenderness.
I don’t ever think that I have gone far enough. I would like to reveal more... to push further... to show with more knowledge of what I photograph. To get people to trust me more in the way that I photograph them...
