Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage | The Museum of Modern Art

Robert Frank is best known for his pictures of a postwar America riven by social and political discord, and for the films he made with the poets of the Beat Generation and the Rolling Stones. So the filmed images found only after Frank’s death in 2019 may surprise some viewers. Tucked away in storage places, these film canisters and tapes, containing footage that spans the years 1970 to 2006, offer insight into the artist’s life and work. In partnership with the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, Frank’s longtime film editor Laura Israel and the art director Alex Bingham have used these fragments to create a 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 cities and coastlines.

The footage in this installation, stitched together by Israel and Bingham to evoke his restless gaze and voice, sheds new light on his artistic process—at once comical and melancholy. We watch Frank journey between his homes in New York and Nova Scotia; down the open roads of the United States and Canada; and amid urban landscapes, including those of Beirut, Cairo, Moscow, and his native Switzerland. Frank makes the most fleeting of pleasures timeless: a warm bath and a steaming tea kettle, a glimpse of his wife June Leaf in her studio, the play of sunlight on his hand.