Documentary photographer Robert Frank drove all around the United States in 1955-’56, shot more than 28,000 black and white images and published 83 of them in the groundbreaking book “The Americans.”
Frank focused on people going about their lives at lunch counters, around jukeboxes, at political rallies, on streetcars and so on. Many of the photographs are rich with social commentary, contrasting rich with poor, privileged with marginalized.
He visited Wyoming and photographed at least in Casper, Lander, Dubois, Fort Washakie and South Pass, exposing about 20 rolls of film and making more than 700 images.
Not one of them made the cut for “The Americans,” a photography milepost that’s widely acclaimed but also criticized for Frank’s hard take on the country’s culture and customs.
Of the 700 Wyoming images, only part of one saw the light of day. The rest “have never been printed, have never been published,” said Robin Everett, an archivist at the Wyoming State Archives.
Now, the historical scenes and mostly gone people from the Equality State are alive again in an exhibit at Cheyenne’s Wyoming State Museum that Everett helped curate. Twenty-one images will hang at the museum through March 29, after which the show will travel to Buffalo and perhaps beyond.
“I want people to look at the images and say ‘Wow! There’s Aunt Dodie!’”
Robin Everett
The exhibit includes both single-image prints from Frank’s 35mm negatives as well as enlarged contact sheets displaying at once about 36 images from a single roll of film.
There’s a horse running through a field, “the long mane flowing back,” Everett said. “A mailbox, boots in the middle of a dirt road, an awful lot of people.”
Elisabeth DeGrenier, the director of exhibits at the museum, said the photographs “show everyday life in Wyoming.
“There’s a mother and her baby sitting in a car, folks at a rodeo, a high school prom, some landscapes.” Frank’s eye “highlights the life of an average American,” she said, “nothing flashy or extravagant.”
No moss
As he rolled through Wyoming, Frank photographed an armed forces ceremony in Casper, capturing a phalanx of saluting servicemen on one side of the frame, civilians lined up on the other. A car parked in the middle of the picture carries a Natrona County bucking bronco license plate and the lettering for radio station KSPR.
The Hotel Townsend, now the Townsend Justice Center, serves as a backdrop. In Frank’s style and method, there’s scant information. Nobody is identified. The picture is titled simply “Public ceremony — Casper, Wyoming, 1956.”
“Public ceremony” is the key that unlocked the photographer’s Wyoming cache for archivist Everett.
“I was doing a personal research project with Casper newspapers,” she said. “Some article came up where they referenced an image that appeared on a Rolling Stones’ album cover.
“Being part of the baby-boom generation, that piqued my interest,” she said.
Everett went down the rabbit hole.
“It had appeared on the 1972 ‘Exile on Main Street’ album,” she said. One article said Frank had taken the photo. He designed and photographed the entire double album’s art – front and back covers, inside spread and the printed sleeves for both disks, one of which has a cropped version of “Public Ceremony.”
Everett, a Wyoming native, admits to having been naïve about the history of photography and Robert Frank himself. That’s no longer the case.
She located Frank’s collection at the National Gallery of Art, which stewards the material for the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. A good portion, if not all, is online.
“After looking at them, I came to the conclusion the state of Wyoming needed to see them,” Everett said.
Aunt Dodie
Frank, an immigrant from Switzerland, carried a small Leica III rangefinder camera suited for discrete street photography. A fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, he mastered composition, lighting and the camera’s controls — shutter speed, point of view and lens aperture. He knew when to trip the shutter.
The contact sheets reveal how he worked. They show how many pictures he took of a particular scene, whether he framed it this way, then that, or just took one exposure and called it good. “I don’t see a lot of duplication,” Everett said.
Altogether, there are five contact sheets and 16 images in the exhibit. “To get as many images out there, we felt the contact sheets would be the best way to go,” she said.
Frank’s presentation in “The Americans” carries scant information. “Trolley – New Orleans” captions perhaps his most famous picture of seven faces looking from the windows of public transportation, the Black ones at the back of the car. Historians say he never asked for names, just took his pictures and moved on.
Part of the mission of the exhibit is to reconnect the Wyoming images with the state’s people. “We’re asking folks if they recognize anybody in the photos,” DeGrenier said.
That would make the pictures more powerful, the two curators said.
“I want people to look at the images,” Everett said, “and say ‘Wow! There’s Aunt Dodie! There’s my grandmother!’”
A Guggenheim Fellowship enabled Frank’s travels. The museum hosts an open house for the exhibit at 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 11.
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