Walter Frank’s photographs capture the ‘moving collage’ of kiosks.
By: Susan Van Dongen
It started as a way of recording the 2004 presidential campaign. Photographer Walter Frank observed the kiosks along Nassau Street and the political posters advertising rallies for and protests against various candidates.
"Initially, my goal was simply to record Princeton’s take on the 2004 presidential campaign, which Ralph Nader would have won in a landslide had the country seen the election the same way the kiosks did," he says.
But the Princeton resident began to see more in the pieces of paper stapled and tacked to the kiosks. The juxtaposition of conflicting messages, the clash of colors, the constant arrangement and rearrangement of flyers began to spark Mr. Frank’s imagination. The papers and posters took on an almost sculptural form.
"I began to focus on the imposition of new messages over old ones, the effects of wind and weather, the accidental arrangement of color and print it all combined to make the kiosks themselves the most interesting (photographic) subject of all," he says.
An early riser, Mr. Frank says he’d take his camera on morning walks. He only shot two kiosks on Nassau Street, one in front of the Garden Theatre and one at the corner of Nassau and Witherspoon. But over the course of a year, there was plenty to see at just these two spots.
"It’s a moving collage," he says. "Every week or two you go by and it’s something different."
The project has grown into an exhibit, on view at the Reading Room at the Arts Council of Princeton’s conTEMPORARY Arts Center at the Princeton Shopping Center. Titled Missing Dog: A Photographic Celebration of Our Community Kiosks, Mr. Frank’s color photos will be on view through Dec. 22.
In one distressing shot, we see a flyer offering assistance with résumés and job interviews juxtaposed against information spelling out the disaster in Darfur, with some 100,000 dead at the time. In America, we worry about our employment situation, but in the Darfur region of Somalia, staying alive is the first order of business.
A campaign poster for Kerry-Edwards is sandwiched between an ad selling a car and a notice of a room for rent.
"This is for people who think, as I do, that maybe (political) campaigns have become too much like marketing campaigns," Mr. Frank says. "I thought this underscored that idea. Then there were the flyers to ‘impeach Bush.’ Just judging from the kiosks, that seemed to be the other choice in Princeton ‘elect Nader’ or ‘impeach Bush.’"
Over the months observing and shooting the kiosks, the photographer became fascinated with the breadth of the messages from a poster promoting Cornel West’s new book to a piece of paper looking for a lost cat. There are the community flyers about yard sales, the rallies for peace and an array of advertisements for cultural arts events in and around Princeton.
"The character of the community really came through," Mr. Frank says. "I think if you put kiosks up in any town for a while, you’d get a good insight into the place. That and riding public transportation are two really good ways to find out about places."
The notices on the kiosks also became a kind of graveyard for the presidential candidates who dropped out of the 2004 race. Wesley Clark’s and Howard Dean’s tattered and faded posters evoke the death of their presidential aspirations and the deteriorated hopes of their supporters. In an ironic twist, the Dean poster is stapled just above a flyer for a Halloween party, as though his ill-fated run was just "dress-up."
The memory of the contentious 2004 presidential race and the continuing feelings some have for the administration comes through in the details of Mr. Frank’s photographs. One shows a bumper sticker that says "Mission Accomplished" but "mission" is crossed out, replaced with "nothing."
An ad for a benefit bake sale that hopes to "Bake Back the White House" brings to mind the old poster from the Vietnam era: "It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber."
Written with phrasing Thomas Paine might have used, one flyer promotes a "Citizen’s Rally and Protest (of) Our Government’s Policy of Deception." It goes on to invite citizens to join in the "Patriotic Exercise of Dissent."
"This one just has a feel of politics," Mr. Frank says. "I like the staples though you can just see someone slamming them in. Sometimes just a little detail like that can make the picture."
Aside from politics, Mr. Frank is interested in faces and their details, zooming in on Frank Zappa’s bemused stare on one flyer, Duke Ellington’s elegant top hat and the can-do smile of an anonymous Pilates instructor.
An attorney with a special interest in history and politics, Mr. Frank worked in the law department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for 30 years, retiring in 2005 as chief of the commercial litigation division. He says he’s always been interested in photography but never considered a career in visual arts, although his father was an illustrator the elder Mr. Frank drew for Gabby Hayes and Captain Midnight comics.
Mr. Frank has been shooting and making special collections of his photos for years. "A friend of my son’s admired the kiosk pictures and suggested I talk to the Arts Council about doing an exhibit," Mr. Frank says.
He hasn’t yet explored people as subject matter, and admires Henri Cartier-Bresson for his ability to capture the details and shifting expressions of the human face, while still managing to create beautiful compositions. Mr. Frank is also influenced by Aaron Siskind.
"He shot primarily in black and white but he liked this kind of project," Mr. Frank says. "He was very aware of how a photographer directs your attention to something within the frame that you might not see otherwise because it was a part of something much larger.
"I love photography but I also just like going out and looking for things," he continues. "On vacations, I’ll get up early and go out for a couple of hours and shoot pictures. That’s extraordinarily enjoyable to me, being out there in the morning with my camera."
Missing Dog: A Photographic Celebration of Our Community Kiosks by Walter Frank
is on view at the Arts Council of Princeton’s conTEMPORARY Arts Center Reading
Room, Princeton Shopping Center, 301 N. Harrison St., Princeton, through Dec.
22. Hours: Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Sat. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. For information, call
(609) 924-8777. On the Web: www.artscouncilofprinceton.org

