Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue

This exhibition catalogue provides new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesser known aspects of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank’s expansive career by delving into the extraordinarily multifaceted six decades that followed Frank’s landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019.

In the six decades that followed the landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019, the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank maintained an extraordinarily multifaceted practice informed by perpetual experimentation and collaborations across various mediums. Frank is often remembered as a solo photographer on a road trip, a Swiss artist making pictures of an America that he traversed as an outsider. And yet, Frank continually forged new paths in his work, often in direct artistic conversation with others, in a ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life.

Coinciding with the centennial of his birth and taking its name from the artist’s 1980 film, Life Dances On explores Frank’s artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities. Featuring photographs, films, books, and archival materials, this richly layered publication includes excerpts from an oral history project undertaken for his centennial, and a special section devoted to his “scrapbook footage,” which provides readers with previously unavailable reflections from Frank himself.