Robert Frank

Robert Frank’s photographs, films and mixed-media works have consistently garnered critical praise while reaching a broad populous of art lovers, academics and collectors. Frank was born in Zurich in 1924, and moved to New York in 1947. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1955, at a time when he was traveling by car across the United States, undertaking a photographic exploration of the nation. The result was a body of work of more than 20,000 images, and a book published in 1958 simply titled The Americans. This publication is recognized as a seminal point in the history of photography, a departure from the thematic and aesthetic norms of documentary photography at that time. Beginning in 1970, Frank and his wife June Leaf divided their time between New York and Mabou, a small community on Cape Breton Island. This shift to a quieter lifestyle precipitated a period of introspective and extremely personal work that continued throughout his life. The big cities and diverse cultural landscapes were gone, and traded for seclusion amidst a rocky and rugged landscape. With few other places to turn, Frank frequently focused the camera on himself, his family and their lives. Frank started to experiment with a Lure Camera, an early type of disposable camera that created 3 ½ x 4 ½ inch colour prints. Combined with text and documents, the collages are often filmic, suggestive of the passage of time and a continual narrative, while at the same time reinforcing the subjectivity inherent to the medium. There is no decisive moment within this work, no single reality. This work is originally from the Mabou Portfolio, which is comprised of six signed, limited edition photomechanical reproductions of collages created in Mabou during the 1970s. The six separate collages were reproduced with a 250 line screen, the colour images with a range of six to eight different-coloured lightfast inks on acid-free Rives cover stock. The black and white images were reproduced with a tritone (three-colour) process, also using lightfast inks on acid-free Rives cover stock. Each print was hand-pulled on a Malibander flatbed press one colour at a time. The edition consists of 70 signed and numbered sets of six prints and 30 signed artist’s proofs, printed in 1980. The original collages are in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Please note: this work is unframed. The Buyer is hereby advised to read fully the Terms and Conditions of Business and Catalogue Terms, including our Stephen Bulger Gallery HO2 Sale Notice and any Addendum or Erratum specific to the Stephen Bulger Gallery HO2 auction.