SICK OF GOODBY’S
A 1978 black-and-white photograph by Swiss-born photographer, Robert Frank; a vertical diptych (created with conjoined photographic frames), “Sick of Goodby’s” contains—in its top half—the dirty, warped beach image of an arm reaching into frame, holding a toy skeleton; the ocean’s horizon-line is in the distance, and the words “sick of” are scrawled across the photo; the lower half of “Sick of Goodby’s” depicts a small mirror resting against a larger mirror, the word “goodby’s” dripping down the image; it is unclear if the words were written in paint, lipstick, or blood; known for his iconic 1958 collection, “The Americans,” Robert Frank made the Kerouac-narrated Beat film “Pull My Daisy” in 1959 and spent much of the next decade creating films; I was aware of Robert Frank’s photos as a teenager, because he—along with Walker Evans—seemed to be the great visual chronicler of mid-20th century, roadside America; the photographs in “The Americans” are formal, elegant, and coolly ironic—just detached enough to create the feeling of immigrant insight into the post World War II/pre-Vietnam era in U.S. history; in college, I had a “hip” art teacher who showed us the rarely screened “Cocksucker Blues,” Frank’s druggy, sexy 1972 Rolling Stones tour film; my knowledge of Robert Frank’s work did not go beyond the Stones documentary; years later, while killing time in Washington Square Park, I began perusing the wares of one of the NYU-area sidewalk booksellers; I bought a French collection of Robert Frank’s photographs—published by the Centre National de la Photographie—for four dollars; the earliest photographs in the book are from 1949, and near the end of the collection is “Sick of Goodby’s”; this was the first time I saw “Sick of Goodby’s,” and I became obsessed with the image; “Sick of Goodby’s” did not resemble any of the Frank photos I knew from “The Americans”; I did not know what happened to the artist in the interim; in the back of this French book is a timeline of Robert Frank’s life, and it says that in 1974: “Andrea muerte dans un accident d’avion a Tikel au Guatemala”; I do not speak or read French, but had a vague sense of the sentence, and “muerte” seemed ominous; after a bit of research, I discovered that in the span of a few years in the 1970’s, Robert Frank’s daughter was killed in a plane crash and his son was diagnosed with schizophrenia; I can not imagine what Frank went through; his life was coming undone, and his photographs—which were influenced by his motion picture work as well as his enormous personal tragedy—would never be the same; Robert Frank’s photographs of this era are messy, scratched, covered in text, and deeply haunted; these photos seem to be movie stills married with script supervisor notes from the nightmare-film of a heartbroken, wrecked man; still, Frank managed to keep producing work; “Sick of Goodby’s” is a sort of mystic, sacrificial art: acknowledging the fragility of flesh, of film, the image is naked, sad, shattered, and ultimately—terrifying; but also, exhilarating; I am afraid of this photograph; if I stare at “Sick of Goodby’s” too long, I feel compelled to call my father and mother.
