Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank

This is a remarkably candid and often moving study of perhaps the world’s greatest photographer.

The film follows the Swiss-born, Stateside artist, who changed the very nature of visual practice with his definitive ’50s publication ‘The Americans’, as he looks back on his life from the perspectives of New York and coastal Nova Scotia. Frank is entirely open and demythologising about his images and films, marriage and family, as well as the profound wellsprings of loneliness and loss, public and private, that have underpinned his work. In the end, he says, ‘the traffic takes it all away like the ocean’, but while we’re here, we could do far worse than follow his example, the mantras of which would be ‘life dances on’ and ‘no fear.’ Fox has managed to communicate something important about the real man behind the artist. 

A superb document.