Top 10 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Frank

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Swiss photographer Robert Frank.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Robert Frank was a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker, who became an American binational. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ ... ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

Swiss - Photographer | Born: November 9, 1924

Source: Wikipedia

You do your work as a photographer and everything becomes past. Words are more like thoughts; the photographer's picture is always surrounded by a kind of romantic glamor - no matter what you do, and how you twist it.

Robert Frank

Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.

Robert Frank

There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.

Robert Frank

I always say that I don't want to be sentimental, that the photographs shouldn't be sentimental, and yet, I am conscious of my sentimentality.

Robert Frank

It is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.

Robert Frank

My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished.

Robert Frank

I have been frequently accused of deliberately twisting subject matter to my point of view. Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love.

Robert Frank

Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.

Robert Frank

The eye should learn to listen before it looks.

Robert Frank

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

Robert Frank