“…I myself am my own homeland…
In Crete with the Minotaur
Without verse and without life
Without homeland and without spirit,
Without anything, without anyone,
…Peacefully, I will drink my coffee”.
Jorge de Sena (In Crete with the Minotaur, 1965)
Robert Frank moved to a fisherman’s house in Mabou, Nova Scotia. Leaving the wonder but also the roughness of his beloved New York behind, he found Mabou to be a desolate place. There were no trees, just deep cliffs leading to the ocean, and the blowing wind. Nothing beyond lonely landscapes. And winter was brutal. But Frank was not alone in this place since his wife June, his daughter Andrea and his son Pablo also moved with him. And this was not Frank’s first move. Born in Switzerland, he immigrated to the US in 1947 at the age of 22. As a Jew he was afraid of the growing intolerance towards Jews in Europe, but also, he found Switzerland’s efficiency, safety, and orderliness too deadening for his spirit. Throughout his life he returned to visit Switzerland several times and traveled to different countries such as France, South America, England, Spain, etc. Although he claimed that there was nothing for him to do in Mabou rather than to “wait for something to happen”, he would soon discover that Mabou would become a place where he had to work through his several losses in life.
Frank was a Beat poet with a camera. A friend and collaborator of the writers and poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he rejected to be labeled as a member of “the Beat Generation”. Above all, Frank was a rebellious outsider and deeply mistrustful of artistic movements and organizations. “I prefer to work on the edge than in the middle of the road”, he claimed. Frank was fascinated by life and people and his photos are mostly about the essence of people. “People are poetic”, he once said. To capture life in its fullest, Frank used intuition as his method, preferring a spontaneous point and shoot than a rehearsed overthought technical photo. “I think that all the good things one does are unconscious, one just has the feeling” was part of his creative method. Frank lived amongst artists and throughout his life he became more associated with the expressionistic painters than with photographers. For Frank, art and photography were the expression of what is inside the artist, not just a documentation of external reality.
“I think that all the good things one does are unconscious, one just has the feeling.”
The study of the creative process has been to some extent an area of interest for psychoanalysis. Donald Winnicott believed that illusion, play, symbols, creativity, and wish fulfillment are essential experiences for the development of the self. Central to Winnicott’s ideas on play is the concept of transitional phenomena, an intermediate area of experience between subjective and objective reality, between dream and reality, between inner and outer world, between self and other, between the conscious and the unconscious. In summary, play, art, the self, and culture are things that can only happen between something. Hence the precariousness of art, but also the fragility of self. And a self can only develop in a (m)other-child relationship, in a space of play between self and other. After all, it is only this other who can make selfhood into something which is real, alive, and authentic. Winnicott believed that psychoanalysis too was the play space between the analyst and patient. Its task would be to allow us to live in this transitional space, in betweenity, but also to get in touch with intense feelings without becoming too worried about emotional or intellectual certainty. For Winnicott, sanity, i.e. life without play, is the incapacity for full living.
If for Winnicott creativity was connected to earlier emotional experiences and relationships, Hanna Segal had different thoughts about the origins of art. Segal thought and wrote about art within the ideas of Melanie Klein. In the paranoid schizoid position, the self and world are split into good and bad, and the infant fears an attack from internal persecutory bad objects. The infant perceives internal and external reality to be continuously attacked and destroyed into bits and pieces. There is a fear of internal persecution by these partial shattered objects and a fear that the loved object inside is being continually attacked and destroyed. The resulting despair and the realization of these attacks lead to an intense feeling of guilt and loss. The movement into the depressive position brings a wish to repair the damage done by these attacks and to restore and recreate the lost and loved objects inside and outside the self. For Segal, creativity was the result of this wish to restore and re-create the memory of a good situation when the ego felt loved, and the world was also good. Art is a re-creation of a loved and whole object that needs to be recovered from a lost and ruined world. Through art, loved and good objects would come back to life, allowing the ego to become more integrated and enriched.
Winnicott believed that creativity was crucial for life, and that sanity as life without play is an incapacity to be alive. Segal claimed that art was the re-creation of a lost and destroyed world through guilt and love.
In 1958 Frank gained notoriety after his photography book “The Americans” was published. The book was the result of his cross-country road trips in America and the people he encountered there. “I wanted to make a really strong picture, the one print that would get the essence of the place I’d been”. And Frank did capture something about the national mood in his visual record of America. The pictures are dark, rough, raw, and the photographed people are grim, absent, and out of focus. The people portrayed in the book are not smiling, there is no traditional beauty, but they are lonely and somewhat tortured. The reception of “The Americans” was harsh among critics. In an America that valued conformism and positivity, Frank’s work was criticized for portraying the least attractive aspects of the country. One critic angerly called the book “a sad poem for sick people”. Frank was accused of being “Anti American” for not showing the mainstream positive optimistic and affluent side of America. But Frank was honest and raw and hard to be tamed. Moreover, his pictures reveal his changing opinion towards America, from an initial fascination to a detached observation, and finally into a hard judgment. Above all, Frank wanted to give his opinion about the real America, and for him this America was a brutal place without any romanticism, and with a lot of problematic complex issues such as racial discrimination towards African Americans. Frank had little interest in reinforcing dominant fantasies of the American dream. He wanted to portray the real people who lived in a complex, diverse, and real country, but also, his emotional estrangement towards this country.
Frank wanted to give his opinion about the real America, and for him this America was a brutal place without any romanticism, and with a lot of problematic complex issues such as racial discrimination towards African Americans.
Considering Frank’s interest in exploring the external world in connection with his internal world, and his depiction of a melancholic America, it would be no surprise to realize that Frank always had a depressive personality. Moreover, Frank was not described kindly by some of his friends who claimed that Frank could be bitter, morbid, nihilistic, and disdainful. To ward off his depression, Frank created a dance of life by keeping himself constantly on the move through his art and creativity. He traveled by car in America, and he spent days traveling in New York by bus and taking pictures of its people. And New York was the ideal place to keep distracted, a place that was full of life: “I have friends that I listen to, girls I’d like to make love with, drunks in the subway which amaze me, blind beggars… taxi drivers who drive around stoned…”. In perpetual distraction, he channeled all his energy to his work to keep his mind turned outwards and not be much in touch with his depressive side. Nevertheless, and despite his efforts, his images were connected with his melancholic mood. Perhaps moving away from New York to Mabou was a way to be more connected with his internal world and emotions. He added “Being here alone, you have to create something… photography… how does it feel to be here”, and “Here you are left with your emotions, your thoughts”.
Life in Mabou would change and tragedy would soon strike his life. In 1974, Frank’s daughter Andrea was killed in a plane crash in Guatemala. After Andrea’s death, Frank’s art changed. He created some arrangements of rocks, piles of drift hood, like totems around the perimeter of his property. One of his most emotional and painful pictures of this period is “Sick of Goodby’s”. This picture portrays a set of pictures within pictures, broken frames and mirrors, leaking containers as an anguished and desperate inner attempt to contain the emotional turmoil of his loss. Frank claims how his photographs “shifted from being about what I saw to what I felt”. One can also feel his sorrow but also anger in these collages and sequences of landscapes and words. Frank claimed these collages of photographs were not attempts to link nor repair what was damaged by loss, but they were a process of destruction. In Frank's words: “It was a deliberate attempt to show that for me the picture itself had ceased to exist”, and “I didn’t believe in the beauty of a photograph anymore”.
In “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud explored on how we react to actual loss or disappointment whether of a loved person, a dream, an ideal, a home country, etc. In normal mourning, there is a conscious acknowledgment and knowledge of what was lost. As a result, there is a gradual abandonment of the lost object and a withdrawal of libido that was connected to the object that is lost. Although there is a period of typical symptoms of depression such as sadness, inhibition, loss of interest, lack of appetite, etc. there is a gradual acceptance of the reality that the object is lost and that the world has become a poorer place without it. This realization allows for the energy linked to the lost object to be freed up and invested into new objects, people, interest, places, etc. However, in melancholia the person does not withdraw the energy from the lost object because part of the ego has identified with the lost object. There is a refusal to acknowledge that the object is lost, and part of the ego becomes the lost object. There is an ambivalence between love and hate towards the object and part of the ego now also attacks sadistically the ego that has identified with the lost object. Self-reproaches, self-criticism, low self-esteem, and excessive guilt now result from this identification with the lost loved and hated object. For Frank, his art has always been connected with his internal states and emotions, and the art made after the loss of his daughter became connected with his painful mourning process. Perhaps art allowed Frank to symbolize his losses, to continue to dream and be creative, to express his anger and despair, and to recreate something new through his art. When asked about on how he dealt with his losses, Frank replied “Life is hard, but life goes on”. Whereas in mourning life continues, in melancholia life becomes withdrawn into the melancholic's internal world and processes.
Freud believed that in normal mourning there is a conscious painful acknowledgment that the object is lost. Energy is freed up from the connection with the lost object and an interest in new objects becomes possible. In melancholia there is an unconscious denial of the loss, or impossibility to symbolize the loss. The ego identifies with the lost object and is attacked due to the ambivalence of love and hate towards the lost object.
After the loss of Andrea, more losses would follow. His son Pablo, who struggled with schizophrenia, committed suicide in 1994. Devastated by the loss, Frank felt the guilt of not having loved his son as much as his son would need him to. Frank’s devotion was primarily to his art; however he also mentioned his frustration in understanding and communicating with Pablo. And later, in Mabou Frank had to face the loss of his youth and life as he entered old age. He claimed “It’s a natural disaster, growing old… it’s an adjustment. And you have to be careful to not be bitter about it… [and become] a nasty old man…. But sometimes it’s better to be a nasty old man than to be polite.”. Although his work was criticized by some of the critics and public, it also gathered a significant number of followers. Some admirers were people who appreciated the outsider America portrayed by the beatniks. Others were captivated by the visceral aspect of Frank’s work. Nevertheless, despite the opinion of critics and admirers and his losses, Frank continued to follow his love for images using photography and film as mediums. He died in 2019.
References:
Donald Winnicott (1951) “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena”
Donald Winnicott (1945) “Primitive Emotional Development”
Hanna Segal (1952) “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics”
R., J., Smith (2017) “American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank”
Sigmund Freud (1917) “Mourning and Melancholia”
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