June Leaf

Scenes from the life of a quiet man and a smart woman. They carry the celebrated surnames Frank and Leaf, both of which were crucial to the 20th century North American art scene, but here they are just Robert and June. Jem Cohen’s camera brims with tenderness for his beloved friends in their late years, searching for their presence in the calming topography of Mabou, Nova Scotia, or the urban decay of New York’s Bleecker Street. Drifting, mutating textures and formats, breathing along with changing landscapes. An exercise in spending time with the world. (Viennale)

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A project June initiated shortly after Robert’s death in 2019, Another Light in the Road stands as a testament not only to the artist couple’s powerfully intimate and creative relationship but also to their enduring ties to the Mabou community of Cape Breton, as we see friends and neighbors gather in the warmth of her kitchen to share colorful stories. Robert and June were profoundly shaped by the landscape of Mabou, with its bitterly windswept winters, its rhythms of sea and light, and its pioneering routine of wood gathering, clothes hanging, window gazing, and art making. After Robert’s death, June continued working tirelessly on new sculptures and paintings. Not long before her own death, on July 1, 2024, June was able to watch a cut of the film and share her satisfaction with Whalen and Parlante, confiding, “You must be very happy to have made this film. I am happy to have this.” — Museum of Modern Art

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An artist in his own right, Clark Winter captured the intimacy of his longtime friendships with Robert Frank and June Leaf in a series of videos shot over nearly 30 years in New York and Nova Scotia. These are a precious record of the married couple’s seemingly inseparable—yet resolutely independent—home and work lives. Today, Winter serves as one of only three board members of the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. — Museum of Modern Art

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A cherished friend of Robert Frank and June Leaf, Alice Attie spent 15 years documenting Leaf as she worked on intricate metal sculptures and drawings in her studio. Attie now serves on the board of the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. — Museum of Modern Art

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"In the summer of 2019 Kara [Walker] and I took our second and final visit to see Robert Frank and June Leaf at their place in Mabou, Nova Scotia. This video is a record of some of the conversations between us. A blooming friendship between two mid-career artists and two late-career ones. I never meant to make this film but some time after Robert died I looked back and lined these moments up." — Ari Marcopoulos

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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.

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Rarely a day passed when June Leaf wasn’t working in her studio…. — Museum of Modern Art

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From January to November 2004, as a kind of carnet de voyage alongside our other activities, we asked one and the same question of various people we met on our journeys, including friends: "Do you remember a moment in your life when something really changed?" We requested them to tell us a story to illustrate their reply, and we filmed them.

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A documentary on the photographer Robert Frank.

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Dedicated from one great photographer to another, I Remember reenacts an afternoon spent with Alfred Steiglitz. Robert Frank plays Steiglitz, Frank is played by the artist Jerome Souther, and Frank’s artist wife June Leaf plays Steiglitz’s own artist wife Georgia O’Keeffe (the two women bear an uncanny resemblance). Together, the three share in simple domestic pleasures, the “hospitality, the wood stove in the kitchen, chicken for lunch, Steiglitz waiting for the sun to appear through the clouds.” — Museum of Modern Art

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Simple objects, photographs, and events prompt Frank to self-conscious rumination. From his homes in New York and Nova Scotia and on visits to friends, the artist contemplates his relationships, the anniversary of his daughter's death, his son's mental illness, and his work.

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"Today memory creeps along the wall at Seven Bleecker. In the back of my eyes, longings and obsessions, Outside someone is yelling Robert! I love New York…." Robert Frank looks back on a lifetime of memory-gathering through photographs, home movies (his parents' gravesite, June Leaf making art), portraits of artist friends (Raoul Hague, Allen Ginsberg), and portraits of those he admired (Jean-Luc Godard). The film resembles one of Gregory Corso's "shuffle poems," as Frank muses, "Together go words and images without sound. I have an obsession in my life for Fragments which reveal and hide truth." — Museum of Modern Art

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This short documentary captures the poetry of the city’s storied skid row before its gentrification.

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Presents an intimate view of four decades of the Swiss-born artist Robert Frank who has had an extraordinary influence on contemporary photography and filmmaking. This documentary which examines his life through his films and photographs, includes interviews with many of his collaborators and contemporaries. Written, directed and edited by Philip Brookman, Amy Brookman

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Home Improvements, Robert Frank’s first video project, is a simple and poignant diary of consequential events. It is about the relationship between Frank’s life as an artist and his personal life, and how the two are inevitably intertwined. It was made cheaply with a half-inch video porta-pak. Home Improvements takes place in New York and Nova Scotia and in the mental space between these two opposing worlds

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The protagonists’ astounding verbal gymnastics and often incomprehensible interactions tend to descend into nonsense, and with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue, this film is reminiscent of the playful and parodying elements of the Beat fantasy Pull My Daisy. The interweaving of documentary and fiction with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue presents an absurd buzz of activity reminiscent of Beckett’s abstract comic grotesque.

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