Robert Frank in Gottingen

Robert Frank and I must have made an interesting sight that warm July afternoon on Düstere Strasse. We resemble each other, but he is older than I, so no matter what we were up to, we could have made sense as father/son.

And in one important sense we were: when I was becoming a photographer in the late 1960s, his book, The Americans, was already a landmark—that’s much too weak a word, but what other word for a body of work that changed the course of the river of Photography in a way that it could never take the old course again.

I would look at it before I went to sleep, and in the morning I would reach for it like a smoker reaches for a cigarette. I needed to see it again. The country was so bleak in those sooty pages, each one an artifact ripped from the landscape and brought straight to the bindery. Frank had found a way to set the tone for the formless lives that went unfilmed in America.

Two years before I encountered his book, I had taken my first cross-country trip—three of us in an immense gold driveway car that needed to be delivered to its owner in Los Angeles. We sailed from the East Coast to the West in less than three days—one of us sleeping across the back seat, one up front trying to stay awake with the driver.

It was December. We angled into New Mexico as the sun was going down and pulled into an A. and W. Root Beer stand. The dirt parking lot seamlessly joined the desert and the desert night. A cold wind came up as the sky turned black—the same cold wind every traveler without a room feels as the sun goes down.

A wrapper from someone’s fries blew into the desert in a moment of Americanized infinity. Frank’s book reminded me of that moment. And now here he was on Düstere Strasse in Göttingen, and here I was beside him. Inside at Steidl, The Americans was being printed—the reproductions were to be as close a match as possible to the Delpire edition that had set Photography on its far ear when it first came out in 1958.

A very tired, 83-year-old Robert had come to Germany from Switzerland to supervise the printing—presumably the final edition of the book. I thought about the apocryphal tale of the young Robert Frank kicking in the swinging doors of a cowboy bar in Nevada, hollering in “you mother fuckers,” before taking the picture and then running like hell. No running now, but the mischief was still in his smile.

He had come to Europe to receive a prize in Spain, but the real agenda was to try out the Switzerland of his childhood as a place to come for his final days. Surprisingly, it had failed in that regard. Robert wanted to go home—to America.

“You can’t go home again. Home hasn’t changed, you have.” How many others in a borderless world would face this dilemma?

The printing had been going well, but today was the day it was going off. Steidl was utterly himself—unshaved and getting things done. Robert was being especially sweet to everyone despite his exhaustion. I noted the care he took when he autographed books for Steidl staffers who timidly came up the stairs to the library. He took sincere interest in the work of other artists who waited in the library like it was a pitcher’s bull pen—we were ready for the nod that would allow us to go downstairs to press.

He especially remarked on a postcard that was being printed for Tacita Dean. It was of an olive tree in Spain that she had designated to be the one beneath which García Lorca and Salvador Dalí had conducted their suspected tryst. Robert pronounced it beautiful and asked her to sign one for him—for his postcard collection.

Earlier in the afternoon, I had gone downstairs to watch as Robert corrected his sheets. I was taken aback by the precision of his memory of the Delpire edition. From the comments Robert was making, I could see it wasn’t just the first edition he was remembering—it was the moments out there, in 1950s America, and how they had looked. The realization gave me a chill.

Here we were in the garden outside the press—I don’t know if it was for the flat light or for the pleasure of a summer day, but Gerhard had placed an easel out the doors. Robert was trying to “open up” a person you can barely see behind the passengers in the windows of the streetcar in New Orleans. A bird came up and pulled my eye on as I tried to think about the provenance of the moment.

Every few minutes, he would speak of his exhaustion and of his desire to go back to his hotel room, but when a sheet came out, his comments were acute—a lion always sleeps with one eye open.

Later in the afternoon, I went down to the carless street—none of the streets in Göttingen permit automobile traffic—and saw Robert wandering in the middle of the bricked roadway. He was ambling. I went up and asked him where he was going. He said he was going to hail a taxi and go to his hotel. One of us made a joke about escaping—Gerhard likes to picture himself as sheriff.

I told Robert I didn’t think there were any taxis to be hailed, but if he would just come back inside and finish the last form, a taxi could be called. Robert made no direct response, but he seemed glad of my company, and he suggested that we go into the antique store across the street so he could look for postcards. (For a guy thinking about the end of things, he was certainly keen about keeping his postcard collection up. Perhaps this was in the daytime: in the middle of the night, there are no postcards to be collected.)

I went into Kitsch & Kunst with him—now I was AWOL too. There weren’t really any postcards, but there were some albums of family trips—journeys long ago cornered into sheets and now for sale.

As Robert leafed through them, I went back to Gerhard to appraise him of the situation. He asked me to bring Robert back to press: the men were waiting, the press was idle.

What followed next is difficult to describe. Robert came out into the street and for the next hour he did a sort of performance. It was a dance of remembrance and reluctance with commentary by the performer interspersed.

In the grey July afternoon, he appeared to be weightless—a trained bear doing slow-motion pirouettes. He butoh’d toward the door to Steidl, but the closer he got to it, the more interesting everything outside it became.

He would turn in the street, float up to a rain gutter and tap it. “I just wanted to see if it’s made out of lead,” he explained as his eyes followed it up to the roof. He went back into the street, pirouetted again, and came back to the wall as his arms floated up a ledge that was at shoulder height.

Did he know that he looked like Christ on the cross as he spoke of his desire to return to America? Of what a good country it was—it had given him his chance.

I remembered these words: “There is no strange behavior—it’s just that some behavior requires more understanding than other behavior.”

Faced with no good choices, Robert Frank did a dance.