Alex Bingham

Fearless Frank

What was it like working with Robert Frank? Laura Israel and Alex Bingham, in partnership with the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, asked a number of his collaborators in photography and filmmaking to reflect on this deceptively simple question. Sid Kaplan, June Leaf, Ed Grazda, Gary Leon Hill, Susan Steinberg, Brian Graham, Ayumi Furuta (A-chan), Ed Lachman, and Tom Jarmusch all make appearances. — Museum of Modern Art

Robert Frank's Scrapbook Footage: New York 1971

After Robert Frank’s death in 2019, film canisters and video tapes were discovered in storage places, containing footage of Frank’s reflections on the world and his place in it, scraps of ideas, and stirrings of art. These moving images, only now being brought to light, offer insight into the home and work life of an artist who is foremost known for the photographs he took of the postwar United States. Partnering with the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, Laura Israel, Frank’s longtime film editor, and art director Alex Bingham have used these fragments to create a kind of moving-image scrapbook. Featuring projections across multiple screens, the installation conveys the intimacy and immediacy of Frank’s observations of family, friends, and collaborators, as well as of domestic interiors and vistas of city and coastline. To capture this footage, which spans 1970 to 2006, Frank spent countless hours behind the viewfinders of various film and video cameras. — Museum of Modern Art

Robert Frank's Scrapbook Footage, 1970–2006

Super 8, 16mm film, and video transferred to HD video (six-channel projection, color and black and white, sound). Like many artists, Frank kept diaries and scrapbooks, which provide a window into his interior life. Similarly, the raw footage used in this installation sheds new light on Frank’s artistic process, stitched together by Israel and Bingham in a way that evokes his restless gaze and declamatory voice, at once comical and melancholy. He journeys between his homes in New York and Nova Scotia; the open roads of the United States and Canada; and urban landscapes, including those of Beirut, Cairo, Moscow, and his native Switzerland. Frank makes timeless the most fleeting of pleasures: a warm bath and a steaming tea kettle, a glimpse of his wife June Leaf in her studio, or the play of sunlight on his hand. — Museum of Modern Art

The King

A cultural portrait of the American dream at a critical time in the nation’s history. Set against the 2016 American election, The King takes a musical road trip across the country in Elvis Presley's 1963 Rolls Royce.

Dear Satan

A typo in a letter causes Satan to have a change of heart.

Dear Satan

A typo in a letter causes Satan to have a change of heart.

National Disintegrations

In his latest film, Braden King ponders the Geneva Freeport, a warehouse complex in Switzerland that is said to house over 1 million works of art. A high-security tax haven for international dealers and collectors, the Freeport's exact contents remain a mystery to the general public. As people crossing borders are more to more and greater scrutiny, NATIONAL DISINTEGRATIONS examines what it means to have untold amounts of wealth and property flow freely through this extralegal space.

The Prevailing Winds

A lone hiker searches for her sister across moorland, despite an invisible and deadly threat in the air.

The Prevailing Winds

A lone hiker searches for her sister across moorland, despite an invisible and deadly threat in the air.

Don't Blink - Robert Frank

The life and work of Robert Frank—as a photographer and a filmmaker—are so intertwined that they're one in the same, and the vast amount of territory he's covered, from The Americans in 1958 up to the present, is intimately registered in his now-formidable body of artistic gestures. From the early '90s on, Frank has been making his films and videos with the brilliant editor Laura Israel, who has helped him to keep things homemade and preserve the illuminating spark of first contact between camera and people/places. Don't Blink is Israel's like-minded portrait of her friend and collaborator, a lively rummage sale of images and sounds and recollected passages and unfathomable losses and friendships that leaves us a fast and fleeting imprint of the life of the Swiss-born man who reinvented himself the American way, and is still standing on ground of his own making at the age of 90.