According to The New York Times, Frank died yesterday at Inverness Consolidated Memorial Hospital in Inverness, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he maintained a summer home.
The cause of death was not disclosed.
Born in Zurich in 1924, Frank studied graphic design and photography and, in the years following World War II, moved to New York and began shooting for various major magazines and traveling the world with his camera to build his portfolio. He then focused his attention on his adopted country, driving across the U.S. and taking an estimated 27,000 pictures. The result was his most famous work, the 1958 collection The Americans.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Frank was commissioned to make photographs for the cover of the Rolling Stones album “Exile on Main Street.” He was then asked by the band to shoot a documentary film about its 1972 concert tour. The film chronicled not only the group’s performances but also the violence of the crowds, the drug use and the naked groupies. It was not what the Stones had in mind. The band obtained a restraining order, which put limits on where and how often the film could be shown.
That same year, Frank published “Lines of My Hand,” a book of photographs he had made before and after “The Americans.” His work was becoming more autobiographical, diaristic.
Mr. Frank acknowledged that in photographing Americans he found the least privileged among them the most compelling.
“My mother asked me, ‘Why do you always take pictures of poor people?’” Mr. Frank told Mr. Dawidoff in The Times Magazine. “It wasn’t true, but my sympathies were with people who struggled. There was also my mistrust of people who made the rules.”
