Robert Frank

Swiss-born Robert Frank has a show at the Met and a film at Film Forum. He is 84 and lives in Manhattan. And no one has had a greater influence on photography in the last half-century.

Though he took many photos and made many films, his reputation rests almost entirely on a single book published in 1958.

The book (a collection of 83 black-and-white images of American life and now on view in a show at the Met) is an intimate visual chronicle of common people in ordinary situations drawn from se...