Flamingo

Long before it became fashionable, Robert Frank took snapshot-style photos: sloppily framed pictures taken in apparently nonchalant haste. But although they might seem arbitrary at first glance, Frank’s photo books tell a different story. Here, the photographs are placed in a carefully selected sequence and convey a clear narrative, and visual associations between them heighten the sense of the drama. The photographer himself is explicitly present – his own hand in the image, his own words scrawled onto the negative. When Frank moved into filmmaking in the late 1950s, he continued to use the keen eye he had developed as a “poet-photographer.” The camera is an extension of his body, and he’s an involved observer participating in the action – sometimes even influencing it. And when it comes to subject matter, he always looks close to home – sometimes literally, as in this short film in which he documents the building of a new foundation under his cottage in Nova Scotia. The montage of disorientating close-ups is intentionally jerky, and the sound has been erased so as not to distract from the rhythm of the cuts. The film's title refers to the eponymous photo book he published a year before. The first pages feature images of a crow, which, it later turns out, is unable to fly – it hangs from a branch, dead. Things aren’t always what they seem.