Club 321 at Mechanics Hall

Frank Armstrong

AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER

AN ARTICLE | STEPHEN DIRADO, CLARK UNIVERSITY

Frank Armstrong was born in Texas and grew up in America in the 1950s and early '60s. He witnessed the threat of communism, nuclear proliferation and the independence of the emergence of the automobile. During his childhood, television replaced the radio, and America, once a vast land, seemed to shrink in size—thanks to the new and ever-expanding interstate highways. Armstrong witnessed when Life magazine illustrated the state of the world and the Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, legitimized photography as an art. At the age of 84, he is certainly an absolute treasure to the photographic communities across the country.

Armstrong discovered his passion for photography early in life. While serving in the U.S. Navy, stationed in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands, he had access to cameras and a darkroom. With time, Frank became self-taught, learning the fundamental language of the medium by reading through piles of photography magazines. Returning home after an honorable discharge, Frank pursued a degree in photojournalism opening the way to his professional career as photographer and teacher.

Frank worked as a photojournalist at the University of Texas during the late 1960s and 70s. On campus, Armstrong had access to the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research archive that includes one of the world’s largest historical photography collections. Sifting through its vast archives, he studied vintage photographs, including work from well-known names like Timothy O’Sullivan, Anna Akins, Walker Evans, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.

Frank also confided in and befriended two legendary photographers teaching on campus; Russell Lee, who was famous for his contribution in documenting the Great Depression with the support of the Farm Security Administration and Garry Winogrand, whose phrenetic photographs defined "street photography" in the 1960s. During the early 70s, all three men affectionately gathered on Friday afternoons to share some drinks and talk shop. One has to just imagine the conversations between these men.

By the 1980s, Armstrong assisted the photographer Oliver Gagliani on a series of workshops. Gagliani was best known for his masterful use of large format cameras and impeccable technical control to create magnificent black and white prints. His favorite subject matter was of long abandond towns in the American southwest. It was during this time working for Gagliani, that Frank found a true mentor. No other photographer before this had "spoken" to Armstrong like Gagliani, addressing his aesthetic sensibility, intellect and similar embodiment of subject matter. Over the following decades, he set out to document the American landscape, concentrating on the Midwest, Southwest and up and down the Continental Divide primarily using a large format camera and shooting mostly black and white films.

For close to twenty-five years, Frank found himself going back to Big Bend National Park, Texas, an area about the size of Rhode Island. Aside from teaching workshops from 1987 through 1993, he refined techniques and matured as an artist. Here, he celebrated his sense of awe immortalizing on a grand scale and in infinite detail, places like the Rio Grande, Chisos Mountains, Hot Springs, Dark Canyon and Ernst Canyon. Frank's book, Rock, River and Thorn: Frank Armstrong, The Big Bend of the Rio Grande was published by Waterhouse & Co in 2001. It celebrates the very best of Frank Armstrong's photographs—all made in black and white.

A shift in Armstrong’s subject matter came about when he moved to Massachusetts in 1992. His wife, Ellen Dunlap accepted a position as the President for the American Antiquarian Society, located in Worcester, Massachusetts. This change in landscape was an opportunity for Frank to expand his scope and seek out new material. Aside from one big trip committed each year across the US, monthly excursions brought him to locations much closer to home that included New England, upstate New York and the Mid-Atlantic states, all on a rotating basis. These trips were haphazardly mapped out, meaning none were planned with any urgency. Most often, Armstrong’s best photographs were made en route to and from his destinations, exclusively traveling along back roads. Explorations shooting in color started to influence his choices in subject matter.

In recent years, Armstrong’s grand landscapes have been replaced with documents of the vernacular—things and places found on the side of the road, such as tired buildings, houses, farms, eateries and facades of businesses that are long defeated. All of his images are void of people, weathered by time, and partially reclaimed by nature. Most of Frank’s favorite material is approached with an acute sense of dignity, but also subtly underscored with irony. Nothing captured in his photographs are sanitized or glorified. With his increasing transition from black and white to color, this motif became more pronounced. Purchasing a medium format digital camera by 2012, Armstrong was able to combine the sharpness of his large format camera with digital color technology to create images that take on a quality of hyperrealism. Over the following years and into the present, Frank has accumulated a massive body of work that pays homage to the ghosts of individuals and their public display of eccentricities. In the end, he knows precisely what to frame within the viewfinder of his camera. His offerings always intrinsically make us ponder, and make us also subtly smile. Over the past two decades, teaching as an adjunct in photography at Clark University, Frank frequently invites select students to assist him on these trips.

The Fitchburg Art Museum is presently organizing a solo exhibition of Frank Armstrong’s work for the upcoming Winter/Spring 2022 schedule. The Fitchburg Art Museum plays a vital role in the culture and viewing of contemporary art in New England.

This article appeared in Juniper Rag’s inaugural issue, with Frank’s work on the cover of the magazine. Image below made by Stephen DiRado.

Frank Armstrong is an important American landscape

photographer who has spent the last twenty-one years

teaching at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

American Roadsides is a survey of Armstrong’s recent

digital color photographs, which reveal aspects of the

American character by focusing on interactions between

material culture (mainly, architecture, consumer products,

and advertising) and the grandeur—and banality—

of landscapes across our country.

—Fitchburg Art Museum