The big empty

Sean O'Hagan, in the Observer, gets a rare audience with Robert Frank in the 80-year-old director-photographer's Bleecker Street digs. The author of The Americans has a career retrospective opening Thursday at the Tate Modern. "'The kind of photography I did is gone,' he says. 'It's old. There's no point in it anymore for me, and I get no satisfaction from trying to do it.' He says this without bitterness or regret, but with a sad matter-of-factness as ingrained as the lines on his face. 'There are too many pictures now. It's overwhelming. A flood of images that passes by, and says, "why should we remember anything?" There is too much to remember now, too much to take in.'"