Timely

Robert Frank discusses his book, "The Americans," with Philip Gefter from The New York Times. The book is an intimate visual chronicle of common people in ordinary situations drawn from several trips he made through his adopted country in the mid-1950s.

In retrospect I might say I was lonely, but I wasn't aware of it. 

I was consumed by my wish to make a document. 

Mr. Frank referred several times to the lessons he gained from just such opportune moments: 

“to find your way by intuition, not by intelligence, but intuition.”

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Then this article. Here I have extracted certain quotes that speak toward what I have been writing about in my application. Look at the body then - even Cindy Crawford's body. I have every intention to reverse the gaze and draw it inward, but this is in a large part because of the ideal then versus the ideal or perhaps, sensationalized and commercialized image now. What has happened? Why in a culture where we want to have more and more power, be "bigger and better" are our bodies becoming smaller and smaller. This use to be a sign of weakness - and now what? - people attribute strength when they see another has been able to control their desires (to eat, to live normally and naturally).

"I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer. I wasn’t trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn’t think of myself as liberated, and I don’t believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live."

It was, more than anything, that sense of naturalness that made Ms. Page a star in this shadowy 1950s world...

To look at these photographs is to enter another world. I don’t think for a minute it was a more innocent world, but it was one in which sexualized images of women, even trussed up in rope, seemed somehow, well, charming. I’m sure there are plenty of women and some men who would disagree, saying that one generation’s erotica is another’s pornographic exploitation. But the sheer volume of images that wash over us now have blunted our sensibilities, I think, and made us less alive to the beauty, the poetry and the mysteries of the naked body. We are surrounded by visuals that are far more explicit than any Bettie Page pinup, images of oiled and sculptured flesh that promise the universe and deliver so little.