Robert Frank's Scrapbook Footage: New York 1971 (2024)

"It starts out as "scrapbook footage." There is no script, there is plenty of intuition."

After Robert Frank’s death in 2019, film canisters and video tapes were discovered in storage places, containing footage of Frank’s reflections on the world and his place in it, scraps of ideas, and stirrings of art. These moving images, only now being brought to light, offer insight into the home and work life of an artist who is foremost known for the photographs he took of the postwar United States. Partnering with the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, Laura Israel, Frank’s longtime film editor, and art director Alex Bingham have used these fragments to create a kind of moving-image scrapbook. Featuring projections across multiple screens, the installation conveys the intimacy and immediacy of Frank’s observations of family, friends, and collaborators, as well as of domestic interiors and vistas of city and coastline. To capture this footage, which spans 1970 to 2006, Frank spent countless hours behind the viewfinders of various film and video cameras. — Museum of Modern Art