(2019-09-10) Why The Rolling Stones Wanted To Silence Robert Frank - hint Group Sex

Why the Rolling Stones Wanted to Silence Robert Frank (Hint: Group Sex). Frank, who died on Monday Sept. 9 at the age of 94... he was a photographer who, in mid-career, having cemented a reputation as one of the premier street photographers of the 20th century, turned his back on that and took up filmmaking and then in late life a sort of photo collage wherein handwritten text was scrawled across the images.

opening salvo, The Americans. Love it or hate it—indifference is not an option—you can’t deny that it was one of the most disruptive works of art of the last century. It is photography’s Rite of Spring, Ulysses, and Citizen Kane.

Beginning in June 1955, with the support of a Guggenheim grant, he motored back and forth across pre-interstate America in his 1950 black Ford Business Coupe for the better part of two years

By the time he was done, he had shot 767 rolls of film and produced around 27,000 black and white images. Then he began winnowing, until he had the 83 photographs in the book.

It is, rather, as if a Martian came to earth and photographed its inhabits

Frank seems neither charmed nor repelled but just baffled by America. Baffled, not repulsed. It’s a big country, he seems to say, and there’s a lot I don’t understand, but damn, it’s never boring.

In Frank’s defense, you could say that he was also biting the hand that slapped him first, because he did not always get a warm welcome in the towns he passed through, especially in the South, where he was once jailed overnight, and on another occasion ordered by the local law to get out of town before one o’clock. Traveling while Jewish, with a foreign accent, in red-scare America was not a recipe for easy acceptance.

they defiantly reject the painterly qualities with which art photography was then associated. On a spectrum, Ansel Adams would be at one end, Frank at the other, and it was a matter of choice: Frank did not want to be Adams, he was not aiming for any kind of hermetic, snow-globe perfection. Rather, he was tracking the same improvisational joy that animated a Lenny Bruce routine or a John Coltrane solo.

Photographer Tod Papageorge called Frank “the photographic equivalent of Arthur Rimbaud—an anarchic poet who sings one brutal song, and then, in despair and exaltation, or whatever joy is found in conjunction with the creation of something incomparable, denies his gift by rejecting it.”

In 1972, the Rolling Stones were finishing up work on what would be Exile on Main Street, and they asked Frank to shoot the cover (Andy Warhol had designed the cover for their last album, Sticky Fingers). Frank gave them more than a photo: he gave them the concept for the whole album design, front and back, inside the fold-out cover, and even the sleeves that held the album’s two records. The pictures of the Stones were stills taken from Frank’s Super 8 film of the band.

The Stones and Frank hit it off, and he accepted their invitation to accompany them on their 1972 tour of the states and to film the tour however he chose. The resulting documentary, Cocksucker Blues, is surely the most famous least seen movie ever. Shot during the Stones’ 1972 U.S. tour, it forgos the performances for the backstage stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic7BmZuk3cs

my job was after the show. What I was photographing was a kind of boredom. It's so difficult being famous. It's a horrendous life. Everyone wants to get something from you.”

The Stones sued to prevent the film's release, and in the court proceedings, it came down to whether Frank as the artist or the Stones as those who hired the artist owned the copyright. A court order restricted the film to being shown no more than five times per year and only if Frank were present.