On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, The Museum of Photography, Seoul, presents for the first time an overview of the photographic oeuvre of this seminal artist to the Korean public. It is comprised exclusively of photographs from the collections of Fotomuseum Winterhur and Fotostiftung Schweiz (Swiss Foundation for Photography) in Switzerland spanning the whole of Robert Frank's career from his first pictures taken in Switzerland in the 1940s to the later Polaroid negative works of the 1990s. The exhibition opens on November 9th 2013, the 89th birthday of Robert Frank, who lives and works in New York and Mabou, Nova Scotia (Canada).

One of the world's most significant and influential photographers, Robert Frank has continually questioned and re-invented the photographic image and explored the narrative potential of sequences of photographs. Since the social observation of his early works, taken with a handheld camera, he has embraced film, video, Polaroids, photo-montage, digital print and published photo-books that changed the course of photographic history.

Robert Frank was born in 1924 into an upper-class Jewish family in Zurich, Switzerland. He went to school there and trained as a photographer during the war year. After emigrating to New York in 1947 he spent much of the next six years traveling in South America and Europe, taking photographs that recorded the everyday lives of the people he encountered. He also experimented with ways of sequencing his photographs, creating poetic or surprising juxtapositions within a series of images. After returning to the United States he embarked on an epic road trip that resulted in the groundbreaking photo-book Les Americains (1958). In 1959, Frank started a second career as an independent film-maker, directing highly personal films and videos that often mixed fiction and reality. When he returned to photography in the early 1970s he began making complex photo-montages combining multiple prints with his own handwritten comments, complex works that became increasingly introspective and autobiographical. Published in the 1989 edition of his second major book, The lines of My Hand, these works definitively established Frank as one of the most innovative photographers, filmmakers and visual artists of the 20th century.

*image (left)
Robert Frank, Trolley, New Orleans, 1956,
Gelatin silver print(vintage), 30.6ⅹ48.5cm,  
Property oft the Swiss Confederation, Federal Office of Culture, Bern,
on permanent loan at Fotostiftung Schweiz
ⓒRobert Frank