Robert Frank & The Americans

Name: Robert Frank & The Americans
Start: 2025-01-16T18:00:00-05:00
Location: Radford Public Library

Schedule

Thu, 16 Jan, 2025 at 06:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Radford Public Library | Radford, VA

Come join the Radford Photo Club at the Radford Public Library for our first meeting of 2025 on January 16th at 6 pm.
As usual, we will have our monthly photo competition. January's theme is *Festivities* and as usual we also have an *open* category. Please bring a print of your preferred size showing your favorite image with festive subject matter. Show us dazzling holiday lights and decorations, joyous faces, and/or celebrations and fun. And, our open category offers a place for unrelated images to be shared and voted on.
This month we will introduce the Swiss photographer Robert Frank (1924-2019) and his body of work. We will be discussing his early career and the historical relevance of his images.
Robert Frank was born and raised by a well off family in Switzerland. He had no academic background in photography but was primarily self-taught and received ample technical guidance through is family's industrial connections. He would emigrate to North America after WW2. Robert had an incredibly star-studded early career that includes a number of brushes with some of America's most prolific historical figures in the arts including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Edward Steichen to name only a few. He is easily the most well known visual artist who documented the lives of the Beat culture of the 1950s. In 1955, he won a Guggenheim fellowship that funded this cross-country trip where he documented with full honesty the very obviously struggling and racially complicated America of the 1950s. These works were published in his most well known work "The Americans". Though not exceptionally well received at the time, it has become a very staying example of a more true face for America.
Time permitting, we will cover some of the complex issues surrounding street photography. Club members are invited to pre-send in their own best example (one, guys, one!) of street photography for the club to view and critique as a group. Reach out to your club contact for more information.