Influential Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank dies age 94

Frank was most known for his work The Americans, which captured ordinary scenes from US life in the 1950s.

Robert Frank
Robert Frank moved to the US at age 23, shortly after World War II, from Switzerland [Kathy Willens/AP]

Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank, one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, died on Tuesday at age 94.

Frank was most known for his work The Americans that captured ordinary scenes of life in the 1950s’ United States. The Swiss-born photographer, who moved to the US at age 23, died in a hospital in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he lived with his second wife.

His death was confirmed by the Pace-MacGill Gallery, which represented his work for the last four decades.

Frank was born in 1924 in Switzerland where his Jewish family stayed during World War II. In 1947, two years after the war ended, he moved to the US.

The 83 pictures in The Americans, picked from a collection of more than 23,000, influenced many prominent photographers in the decades following its 1958 release. The book was initially not received well as its style was considered too raw.

Among one of Frank’s most famous photographs is the scene of a racially segregated bus because of the US Jim Crow laws.

Robert Frank
An exhibition featuring Frank’s work, Robert Frank: Books and Films, 1947-2016 [Kathy Willens/AP] 

During the 1970s and 80s, Frank also worked as a filmmaker on a notorious documentary about a 1972 tour by The Rolling Stones that featured a lot of sex, drugs and alcohol.

The iconic rock group sued Frank to stop the release of the documentary, but he eventually won the right to show it under strict conditions.

Frank had two children. His daughter Andrea died in a 1974 plane crash and his son, Pablo Frank, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and he committed suicide in 1994.

The deaths of his children played a significant role in his later work.

Robert Frank
 The 83 images in The Americans influenced many prominent photographers over the decades [File: Jeff Chiu/AP]
Source: Al Jazeera