Robert Frank left still photography for ‘another mistress.’ Here she is.

NEW YORK — In 1960, Robert Frank published a slim volume of 83 photographs called "The Americans," which remains one of the most absorbing and disturbing photographic projects since the medium was invented in the middle of the 19th century.

Culled from some 27,000 images, made during a two-year trip across the United States, "The Americans" captured the United States not as a vibrant world power — muscular, euphoric and a beacon to the world — but rather as a nation of festering class and racial divisions — anxious, wary and suspicious. The people photographed were lost, or angry, uncertain how to navigate the technological, cultural and political changes of modernity.

Skip to end of carousel The Style sectionStyle is where The Washington Post explains what's happening on the front lines of culture — including the arts, media, social trends, politics and yes, fashion — with wit, personality and deep reporting. For more Style stories,. To subscribe to the Style Memo newsletter,. End of carousel "Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" asked Jack Kerouac in "On the Road." Frank, a Jewish immigrant from Switzerland, answered on behalf of his adopted country: "We have no idea."

"The Americans" fused the uncanny candor of street photography with a rigorous photographic technique and a subtle but gripping organization into chapters and themes, each photograph echoing, foreshadowing or subverting its neighbors. It wasn't an instant success, but it triumphed slowly and as the '60s rolled on, every photographer in America wanted to be Robert Frank — except Frank himself, who disliked the publicity, fame and lionization.

And then came a strange and vexing artistic volte-face, as Frank all but disavowed the book and turned away from the kind of photography that had made him a household name. He explored film, aligned himself with the Beats, including Kerouac (who had written the introduction to "The Americans" when it was published in the United States) and turned his camera increasingly inward, exploring a life that became smaller, more remote and ever more haunted by the mystery of mortality and inevitability of death.

" Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue ," a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, explores the work Frank made after "The Americans," including in an adjunct show, " Robert Frank's Scrapbook Footage ," a trove of unseen films that were found after the artist's death in 2019 . Frank has been well served by museums around the world, and this isn't the first exhibition to grapple with the work he made after "The Americans" (a 1994 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art wrestled with the longer arc of his career). Surprisingly, however, it is his first solo show at MoMA.

It leaves one with a powerful sense of sadness, not just because much of the later work feels autumnal and bleak, but because Frank seems a rather sad figure, reclusive and ill-served by an antiestablishment, anti-institutional, anti-artistic ideal of creative independence. After his initial break with photography, his early films feel simply amateurish. That was intentional, an open embrace of the unfinished and sketchy aesthetic, but it was also a creative dead end for a photographer alienated from his own talents and strengths.

That is almost certainly not what the curators (Lucy Gallun, Kaitlin Booher and Casey Li) of this well-executed show would want visitors to conclude. And it will rankle the devoted cult following of films like " Pull My Daisy ," a short film Frank made with Kerouac and Alfred Leslie, released in 1959. Featuring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky, among others, "Pull My Daisy" feels improvisational and ostentatiously homemade. Its most substantial and memorable element is a fine score by David Amram. (Musicians seem much less susceptible to the fetish for the amateur aesthetic.)

But "Pull My Daisy" has a curious quirk, which recurs throughout Frank's later work: Kerouac's narration tells us exactly what we are looking at, a verbal duplication of the visuals, rather like a sports announcer doing play-by-play. If a picture is worth a thousand words, why do we need this linguistic overlay? Why does Frank so often narrate his own homemade movies with the same extraneous descriptions, telling us, for example, that he is about to take a bath as we see him fill the bathtub? And why does he frequently inscribe words on his still images?

The exhibition surveys the standard interpretations of Frank's enigmatic later work, following the artist's own autobiographical prompts. By the time "The Americans" was published, Frank felt constrained by still photography and wanted to explore the connections between images rather than make perfect, self-sufficient snapshots of daily life. He yearned for the improvisational and exploratory power of cinema, and when he returned to still photography, he frequently overlapped, juxtaposed or collaged his material.

He spent a lifetime in flight from his early work as a commercial and magazine photographer, working on assignment. He admired the Beats and their nose-thumbing indifference to polished work and he found collaboration more fulfilling than solitary work.

He compared photography to romance: "I loved it, I spent my talents on it, I was committed to it; but when respectability and success became part of it, then it was time to look for another mistress or wife." In real life, he was married twice and had two children, both of whom died tragically; but as an artist, he left home and never came back.

The exhibition charts that restlessness. It opens with the 1958 still photography series "From the Bus," which has much of the raw, lonely, anxious power of "The Americans." But then he gave an explicit, if not entirely binding, farewell to the medium, and farewells became a theme of his work, especially after his daughter perished in a 1974 plane crash and his son, who had schizophrenia, died by suicide in 1994.

Often, in his film and video work, the camera mimics the eye of a street photographer, searching for a point of interest, a motif, a center of the action. In film footage of a 1972 antiwar demonstration in New York, the camera darts around, zooms in and out, mimicking how our organic eyes actually process visual data. It isn't an eye on the world, but an eye the world.

His collaborations with Ginsberg, his unreleased and rarely screened documentary about the Rolling Stones, and his record covers for groups such as the New Lost City Ramblers all suggest a subtle but critical shift in how he related to the world as an artist. Frank had tired of standing apart from the world, observing, as good photographers must.

And so, Frank became more interested in first thoughts rather than final ones, and much of the work he made after trying to break free from still photography feels like an effort to explore the sketch, as if he was looking for an analogue to the quick, visual first take that would precede a painting or a sculpture.

In later decades, especially after he and his second wife, the artist June Leaf, bought a house on Cape Breton Island in Canada, photography, language and melancholy became fused in his photographic work. He would scratch words onto the negatives or scrawl them across the prints, not like captions with explanatory power, but more like labels — or worse, a surly effort to control any freedom of interpretation. When the work touches explicitly on his personal pain, it's impossible to resist its power, as in a 1995 photograph of fish on a chair with the words "The Suffering the Silence of Pablo" inscribed above and below.

But in other works, he shows and tells without any accretion of meaning, as if he wanted to store away in a private archive the raw, forensic evidence of a moment that he alone lived and would never live again. One senses not just a personal crisis of loss or grief, but a crisis of meaning and memory. "Wouldn't it be fantastic if you didn't even have to have a piece of celluloid between you and what you saw," he said.

"The Americans," full of irony, bracing insight and occasional bitterness, was a revelation and a gift to the world. The work that came later may have been good for Frank, a kind of extended self-therapy and ocular journaling, but it never came to the same level. That's sad, because throughout this exhibition there is abundant evidence that he never lost his eye, just his willingness to use it without a reflexive and self-lacerating defeatism.

Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue