Hold Still-Keep Going.

Photographs by Robert Frank Edited by Ute Eskildsen (Zurich, Switzerland: Scalo Verlag, 2001)

A lavish exhibition catalog of Robert Frank's "Hold Still--Keep Going," this monograph combines three essays and an interview with 70 plates spanning the period 1948-2000. The book does not attempt an exhaustive survey and focuses instead on asserting a fundamental connection between the selected works that include his earliest still photographs, experimental films and image/text/photograph/paint collages. The images are not presented in a chronological order, but rather assembled to highlight serial qualities and sequential associations throughout Frank's work in various media. Within these new juxtapositions of mostly familiar images, the book allows for fresh interpretations of what has perhaps become the quintessential opus of artistic vision in America. In his accompanying essay, Christoph Ribbat makes a case for Frank as, "the Swiss photographer, as an American poet." Comparing him to philosopher Julia Kristeva and musician Neil Young and contrasting him with Ansel Adams as well as Edward Weston, Ribbat suggests, "He doesn't treat nature as a space in need of aesthetic domination. Instead, he shows it as an uncertain, dreamlike sphere of memory." Although the personal leitmotif makes the work difficult to penetrate at times, its lingering appeal is beautifully expressed in a collaborative image with June Leaf, The Mailbox at the Road to Findlay point, Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Autumn 1976/1985. This composite panoramic image is at once sweeping and intimate, richly seductive and bitterly cold, both objective photograph and expressionistic painting. In an interview with Ute Eskildsen preceding Ribbat's essay, Frank, rather poetically, addresses this dominant notion of memory in his work, "Memory helps you--like stones in a river help you reach the shore." Wolfgang Beilenhoff argues that Frank, who has said "there is no decisive moment" in filmmaking, "considers photography an attempt to inscribe something accessible only to imagination and to memory onto the visible world." He speaks of Frank's still images and their material quality as literally becoming "actors" in the films. With this line of thought, a circular connection, akin to a mnemonic trace, is once more evoked between the still and moving image.

Much as the photographs from "The Americans" ran counter to the fine-art aesthetic of the 1950s, Frank's work as presented in this book now distances itself from the slick for-sale items and didactic strategies we are often confronted with today. Frank's images somehow leave you with your hands dirty and your mind adrift--you sense a message without mechanically dissecting a meaning. Not always easily interpreted, however, the images usually require an emotional investment similar to Frank's on the part of the viewer. The book ultimately offers a challenging and inspirational treatment of the work and provides insight into an intimate connectedness between single, multiple and moving manifestations of the same vision. In thinking about the notion of Frank as an "American poet" while perusing the images in this book, I am reminded of the opening lines in Stanley Kunitz's poem "The Image-maker," "A wind passed over my mind, insidious and cold. It is a thought, I thought, but it was only its shadow."

Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, edited by Alexandra Juhasz. University of Minnesota Press/280 pp./$49.95 (hb), $19.95 (sb).

ARTIST'S BOOKS

Eohnchang Koo: A brief history of Korean photography followed by a look at my own work. Reykjavikur Museum of Photography/39 pp./price unavailable (sb).

Magnus Olafsson and His Contribution to Icelandic Photography. Reykjavikur Museum of Photography/49 pp./price unavailable (sb).

One Thousand Words or Less, by David Kramer. (P.O. Box 1492, New York, NY 10009) /non-paginated/price unavailable (sb).

Strip Tease, by Katie Burkart. Nexus Press/non-paginated/price unavailable (sb).