A look back at the mid-20th-century photographs of Robert Frank

Fifty years later, the 83 painstakingly selected black-and-white photographs from Robert Frank’s epic book “The Americans” remain as fresh and powerful — if not as startling — as they were when the volume was published.

Upon its release in 1959, however, the book was pilloried by critics because it exploded the rosy, self-satisfied fantasy of America that grew out of the post-World War II boom, presenting the American Dream as one not shared by, or equally available to, everyone.

Frank, a Swiss-born Jewish emigre living in New York, had rejected photography’s formal modernism of the period in favor of spontaneity, authenticity and a raw-edged style that shocked both the populace and cognoscenti alike. Eventually, other photographers picked up the torch, and the cultural zeitgeist shifted. Today, Frank is credited with having changed the course of American photography, and his book is regarded as possibly the most important tome in the history of the medium.

Despite some 12 books and 25 films on his résumé, Frank, to his continuing dismay, has been identified most closely with “The Americans,” whose success brought him the celebrity he shunned. But for the 50th anniversary of its publication, the artist, now 84, consented to a re-examination of his iconic work — in a new edition, and a museum exhibition, both titled “Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans.’ ” The reissued book presents the seminal photographs within a larger compendium, and the companion exhibition is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through Aug. 23.

Funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank had set out across the country in the mid-1950s and returned with nearly 28,000 photographs. As a foreigner, his outsider status afforded him a detached perspective.

“He saw a country so unlike his own, where almost anything was possible, but he also saw the myth it had created about itself,” says Corey Keller, the museum’s associate curator of photography. “He saw the contrasts between the story that was being told and the truth. Over and over again, you see these symbols of American culture — the jukebox, the car, the advertisements of abundance — and then you see the people who are standing next to these symbols and how their lives often had nothing to do with the surface picture that was being sold.”

Point of view

In the land of plenty, Frank captured deprivation and loneliness, unheralded lives of quiet desperation as well as hidden beauty. In a major departure from reigning practice, he discarded the traditionally photogenic subjects of photography and, instead, trained his lens on the invisible and forgotten, trading controlled, carefully composed environments for intuitive, on-the-run shooting. Viewing the images from a 2009 vantage point, it’s difficult to comprehend why they scandalized their audience half a century ago.

The lure and bleakness of the open road are cast in half light, and a dark horizon looms in the distance in “U.S. 285, New Mexico.” In “Movie Premiere, Hollywood,” a blond woman is beckoned by glamour. A self-styled dime-store cowboy lights up a cigarette on a debris-littered street in “Rodeo, New York City.” The image of Franks’ wife and children in a car on the side of the road speaks eloquently of desolation in “U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas.”

Elsewhere, racism is revealed as a fact of life, ingrained in society, rather than as a premonition of the incendiary conflict of the following decade. Frank’s “Funeral, St. Helena, South Carolina” shows a gathering of black men clad in their Sunday-go-to-meeting best and leaning against sedans. “Charleston, South Carolina” catches a stoical black nanny in an unguarded moment as she clutches a white baby to her bosom.

Frank may have shot in a deceptively casual style, but there can be no doubt of his mastery when you encounter “Men of Air, New York.” A perfect photograph on its own terms, depicting the Thanksgiving Day parade with a strongman balloon overhead, tilted perspective and blurred office buildings in the background, it’s uplifting without being sentimental, borne aloft by a touch of greatness.

The show provides an in-depth analysis of the creation and construction of “The Americans” (which was published in 1958 in France, a year before its U.S. release), as well as an explanation of images and influences that informed Frank’s sensibility. The show also looks at the sequencing of his images and his impact on a younger generation of photographers who embraced his bold new direction. Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander were among those who emulated him. (Annie Leibovitz is one of his admirers.) And now, images of ordinary people — dowdy housewives, beleaguered luncheonette waitresses, down-on-their-luck cowboys — are in vogue.

San Francisco show

At the San Francisco museum, the exhibition is presented in four sections, as it was at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it originated. The first explores the artist’s development and his handmade books, including “40 Fotos,” “Peru” and “Black White and Things.” The second is devoted to his correspondence with friend Jack Kerouac and mentors Walker Evans and Edward Steichen, and to Frank’s vintage contact sheets, collages and work prints. The third showcases a complete collection of elegantly mounted, vintage prints from “The Americans,” in their original sequence. The last assesses the aftermath of the book.

With the tectonic upheaval of the 1960s in full swing, Frank’s fortunes changed. “He went from an outsider to a cult figure,” Keller says. “The mantle lay very heavily on his shoulders.”

To judge from Frank’s final sculptural object — a messy pile of prints from “The Americans” series, tied and bolted together with a row of faded contact-sheet images below — he would have preferred to obliterate the entire experience.

As the show vividly illustrates, “The Americans” was both a visual tone poem and social report card. Taken as a whole, it offers a snapshot of who we were in the middle of the last century.

It will be for today’s viewers to determine for themselves how much has changed and how much remains the same.