Robert Frank, photographer of America's underbelly, dead at 94

Robert Frank, a trailblazing documentary photographer whose raw, piercing aesthetic placed him among the 20th century’s greats, has died, according to his gallery. He was 94 years old. The Swiss-born photographer rose to fame with the publication of his landmark book “The Americans,” an unflinching look at US society that proved hugely influential. A spokesperson from the Manhattan gallery Pace/MacGill told AFP that Frank died overnight of natural causes in Inverness, Nova Scotia. His seminal book — published in France in 1958 and in America one year later — emerged out of a series of road trips across the United States with his family in the mid-1950s, a journey akin to those made by his friend and writer Jack Kerouac and others from the “Beat Generation.” Eschewing classic photographic techniques,