Making Connections, Making Art

For Frank, art is the ultimate form of freedom. “Artists are free to approach a work in any way they choose. They reveal their inner workings through the act of creation.” He believes artists make themselves vulnerable by laying their thoughts bare in their work— an act of courage that has defined his life and career. 

Abe Frajndlich ’64 was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany in 1946. He has had three dads (and so three last names: Sapir, Witorz, Frajndlich) and two moms, both who survived concentration camps. In the first 10 years of his life, he moved to Israel, back to Germany, then France, Brazil, and finally, the United States. Because he didn't speak English when he arrived in Cleveland (just six other languages), the vice principal at Euclid Schools wanted to put him in first grade for what would be his fourth time. Abe did not find this amusing. In what became a lifelong practice, he questioned authority. Speaking in Spanish to this vice principal, who happened to be from Spain, they struck a deal—learn English in six weeks or go back into the first grade. So, he and his mother stayed up many many late nights reading together. He escaped returning to first grade and the next year, won the school's speaking prize. 

Later, his parents could see he needed a challenge, and they found US. Abe is grateful for it, "I remember my teachers, as much as they wanted you to wear your tie and all that stuff, they also wanted you to do your own thinking." Abe noted the senior speech requirement, and remembers he did a funny take on it, but doesn't remember the content because, as he said, dryly, "I am 112 years old, so it was over 90 years ago." He was in the debating society, where you had to be able to take either side of an issue, whether you supported it or not. "Those kinds of things prepare you for the world because there is no script, you have to make it up as you go along. I ended up being able to talk to anybody." 

Abe has talked with, and photographed, people from all over the world, from heads of state and scientists, and renowned actors, artists, and especially photographers, to people on the street, "I feel at home with all of them," he says. 

Though he owned a camera shortly after arriving in Cleveland, and even took some photos for the Mabian, he only found his career in photography after studying literature at Northwestern, where he wrote his master's thesis on James Joyce's Ulysses. "I was heading toward a PhD when it dawned on me that if I kept this up, I'd be living in libraries for the next 25 years. The camera was a passport that opened so many incredible places and people to me that a library would not have. I was engaged by that quest." 

He moved to New York City in 1984 and started taking pictures. Through serendipitous connections of Cynthia, his wife, who knew an editor for the German magazine Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and a friend who could connect him with the writer Charles Bukowski, an elusive subject the magazine wanted to capture, Abe made an artistic and professional breakthrough. This work opened the door to other publications, including The New York Times and Life magazine. From an assignment that started with Life, and continued for two years with funds from Kodak, Abe spent 20 years circling the world photographing a kind of person that may be the most challenging to photograph—photographers.