Description

An installation comprised of numerous photographic elements scattered over a background of maps.

Additional Information

An important element of the graduate curriculum that Starr Ockenga established at the Creative Photocraphy Laboratory was a program of visiting residential faculty, and in 1980 she brought photographer Robert Frank to MIT. No postwar photographer was more influential than Frank, whose 1958 photo book "The Americans" remained an inspiration decades after it was published. What Frank described as the “visual study of a civilization” exploded photographic practice with its chilly, dispassionate vision of American life. His startling black and white images of everyday life were grainy and seemingly craft-less, yet cut sharply through the stereotypes of comfortable postwar life. He “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film,” Jack Kerouac famously said. Frank showed that meaningful photography was not necessarily about important subject matter, a timeless moment, a perfectly composed picture, or a beautifully executed print. Frank was a reluctant teacher and Ockenga had to travel to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where Frank lived, to convince him to come to MIT. He was by this time a committed filmmaker, collaborating with MIT’s Richard Leacock while in residence at the CPL, but Frank still had much to say about the making of photographs, as his former students testified. His photographs “pointed out the truth,” one student said, and he taught as much about life as about art, as White had also done. Although Frank had already achieved legendary status, his humility and lack of self-conceit impressed the MIT students: he dressed simply, spoke slowly and thoughtfully, and was “not oozing with confidence.” One student observed that she learned from him “that it was entirely fine to move quietly through life.” -- Benedict-Jones was already an exhibited and published photographer in Europe when she enrolled in the CPL’s new graduate program in 1980. Her instructors included visiting professor Robert Frank, whose teaching was enormously influential for her and for all of the students in the small graduate class. One of Frank’s field trips, to the Boston South Shore, resulted in an assignment with Polaroid film that he defined as a visual statement of the students’ intimate thoughts on photography. Benedict-Jones’ response was a reflection on her decade of work in Europe, adaptation to life in the U.S. upon her return (especially American city living), and her experimentation with new photographic forms and methods learned from Frank and other CPL faculty. She assembled photographs made during Frank’s visit with a diaristic commentary in an accordion book augmented by maps and other graphic material. The critical “thought balloons” of other students and Frank himself annotated her large, wall-gripping installation at the CPL.