Bill Burke passed along an excellent article - the best I’ve read in a while, in fact - titled Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey, written by Charlie LeDuff for the latest Vanity Fair. Once you start, you can’t stop (it has a nice humor to it):
Robert Frank, the photographic master, the last human being it’s been said to discover anything new behind a viewfinder, collapsed in a filthy Chinese soup shop and no one had thought to bring along a camera.
He looked like something from a Kandinsky painting—slumped between a wall and stool—sea green, limp, limbs akimbo. It would have made a good, unsentimental picture: a dead man and a bowl of soup. Frank would have liked it. The lighting was right.
The article itself is definitely worth reading the rest of, but I want to also pass along Pull My Donkey [the title references Frank’s first movie and important avant-garde film, Pull My Daisy (1959)], a simple film of Frank and and his wife, June Leaf, made by LeDuff in a style inspired by Frank’s own work.
A great little short to accompany the article. Enjoy.