His stark masterpiece The Americans changed photography. Yet there was more to this countercultural hero who captured the debauchery of the Stones – and his own personal tragedies Robert Frank dies aged 94‘People want to know so much,” Robert Frank answered wearily when I asked him back in 2004 about the lasting resonance of his classic photobook, The Americans. “All the time, this wanting to know. Where does it lead? Nowhere.”
We were sitting in the spartanly furnished kitchen of his apartment on Manhattan’s Bleecker Street, my tape recorder resting on a rickety table between a large brick of a mobile phone and a single bread roll. He was, it strikes me now, a man for whom fame and its comforts meant very little, whose sadness seemed more palpable than his genius. Almost 80 then, he seemed ineffably world-weary.