A nation that is premised on an idea—not on an alleged shared bloodline or eons of history on common acreage—is prone to periodically question exactly who and what it is. The matter that binds Americans, as much as any doctrine or document, is the pursuit of a definition of who Americans are. There are facile adjectives applied to us—optimistic, volatile, swaggering—but they more often seem to apply to pretensions that we wear before the world. Who we are in our unguarded moments, and even what portion of people are included in the word we, is another matter entirely. This is part of the reason that Robert Frank’s photographic essay “The Americans,” published in France in 1958 and released in the U.S. a year later, is both an indelible reflection of American culture and one of the works that helped define it. To produce it, Frank, who died this week, at the age of ninety-four, spent two years scouring the country in a used car, courtesy of a Guggenheim grant, a contrail of dust his most constant companion.
Frank was born in Switzerland, in 1924, to a Swiss mother and a German-Jewish father. His family remained safe throughout the Second World War, but he became part of the postwar exodus from Europe, departing in 1947 for New York, where he settled; later in life, he began dividing his time between Manhattan and Nova Scotia. His early magazine work, in Harper’s Bazaar, gained him a reputation in New York arts circles, but it wasn’t until 1955, when he undertook the work that became “The Americans,” that his capacity as a photographer and a chronicler became widely apparent. Frank evolved as an artist, eventually turning to film and directing—most notably “Cocksucker Blues,” a cinematic record of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 U.S. tour, which became the subject of a protracted lawsuit. (The Stones attempted to suppress the film, partially out of fear over how its illicit contents would be received in the United States. On Tuesday, the band put out a statement calling Frank “an incredible artist whose unique style broke the mould.”) But “The Americans” remained Frank’s best-known work, a reference point for both him as an artist and the medium in which he created it.
It’s often difficult to gauge the importance of a work long after its initial appearance, because the groundbreaking ideas of one generation tend to become the accepted conventions of those that follow it. “The Americans,” however, was compelling as a contemporary document when it was released, and it remains so as an archival representation six decades later. The eighty-three photographs in the book were culled from more than twenty-seven thousand that Frank took in Nebraska, Montana, Connecticut, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, California, and various points in between. The original cover features a gracefully composed image of a trolley car in New Orleans, the passengers gazing directly out, as if deliberately holding eye contact with the viewer. It is a document of a mid-century American conveyance, but also a subtle testament to much more. The implications of the arrangement of those passengers—the black travellers are seated in the back—and the trolley’s metaphorical depiction of an entire set of social relations are simply hinted at. Frank succinctly, subversively places all these people, who are literally heading in the same direction, under the title line of the book. They are the Americans.
The array of moments that Frank captured and presented is a statement on the broad, unwieldy idea of America itself: a lone Jehovah’s Witness standing in Los Angeles, his face weathered and intense; a Miami dowager mid-conversation, a stole draped casually about her shoulders; a woman and child in a packed car in Butte, Montana, both so weary and concerned that they seem like real-life Joads, heading off in pursuit of better fortune. The American flag appears randomly in the series, affixed to a building during a parade in Hoboken, New Jersey; at a Fourth of July celebration in Jay, New York; in a bar in Detroit. A man in Venice, California, fashions one into a canopy, to shelter himself from the sun. The motif points to the varied undertakings here, the staggering diversity of lives coexisting in forty-eight contiguous states.
When Frank was working, photography had already been integrated into the media, but its universal acceptance as art, hastened by John Szarkowski’s tenure as the director of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was still years away. Americans might see images from other parts of the country in newspapers, and projects such as the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration had created an archive of invaluable documentary photography, but the idea of essentially introducing America to itself through images, as Frank endeavored to do, was still an ambitious use of the craft. He was also working before the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 had transformed the road trip into an American rite. When Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” appeared, a year before “The Americans,” the idea of driving across the country still carried a frisson of audacity and adventure. Fittingly, Kerouac wrote the introduction to Frank’s book, in which he noted that Frank had “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.” Even decades later, that is a remarkable assessment of what Frank achieved, even if those words don’t resonate the way they might’ve in 1958.
Earlier this year, I visited the Pier 24 Photography gallery, in San Francisco, to see an exhibit called “This Land,” a portrait of the United States as witnessed by eighteen photographers. It’s a project that clearly finds Frank’s work in its genealogy. The collection included Alessandra Sanguinetti’s compelling images of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, and Richard Misrach’s stark, beautiful photographs of the California desert. But it also included evidence of American decline: Brian Ulrich’s images of defunct shopping malls, Dawoud Bey’s picture of the shuttered Lenox Lounge, in Harlem, portraits of random Americans from Bruce Gilden’s “Citizen” series, each of their faces portending, like a bad-weather forecast. If Frank captured the visages of people who look as if they just punched out from a double shift, Gilden’s subjects look as if the plant had shut down three years prior and nothing has opened in its place. Declension is a conspicuous theme in “This Land” in a way that is absent from “The Americans.”
It is a strange and ironic form of achievement to craft outstanding work at age thirty-four and live to see that work define you as an artist for the next sixty years. Yet Frank’s book, and thereby his statement about the country, still warrants consideration, albeit for reasons that are very different than when it initially appeared. We know how many of the themes that Frank touched on in the book have played out, yet we’re no closer to answering many questions they raised about American identity, and are perhaps more belligerently confused by them now even than we were in 1958. Kerouac saw sadness in Frank’s collection, but what is most notable about the staid, unburnished faces now is their comparative sanguinity. The passage of time does to emotion the same thing that inflation does to prices; yesterday’s extravagance seems a steal today. And sadness, like exorbitance, depends entirely upon what it’s being compared to.
