Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue – Hardcover

Edited by Lucy Gallun. With contributions by Kaitlin Booher and Sarah Greenough.

For the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, the year 1958 marked, as he later noted, “the beginning of something new.” Having completed the selection of images for his landmark photobook The Americans, Frank, ever the restless artist, embarked on a path of creative exploration that lasted six decades, until his death in 2019. Across mediums, in photography, film, video, and books, his distinctly personal work reckoned with the death of loved ones and the passage of time. In collaborations with writers, musicians, publishers, and other artists, he also reflected on his role in a community of artists and neighbors, both in New York City and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he and his wife, the artist June Leaf, moved in 1970.

Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, the first solo exhibition of Frank’s work at The Museum of Modern Art, presented on the occasion of Frank’s centennial, asks us to look beyond the role in which Frank is typically cast—as an observant outsider turning his lens on his adopted country—and see him as a deeply reflective artist who understood that meaning is often made out of our relationships with others. 192 pp.; 150 illus.