Robert Frank - The Americans (1958)

Photographer: Robert Frank

Robert Frank is a Swiss-born American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most well-known work is The Americans, first published in France in 1958. Partly to escape the confines of his business-orientated family and home, Frank turned to photography and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before creating his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946. 40 Fotos incorporated original photographs in various genres, and displays Frank’s early recognition of the power of presenting multiple photographs in a single page spread or in a bound series.

In 1947 Frank emigrated to the United States, and worked for Harper’s Bazaar in New York City as a fashion photographer. He then travelled around South America and Europe before returning to the states in 1950. In that same year he met photographer Edward Steichen, and participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Frank was initially optimistic about the United States society and culture, but this quickly changed when confronted with the fast pace of American life, and his perception of their overemphasis on money. He now thought America an often bleak and lonely place, a theme that would become evident in his later photography. He and his family briefly moved to Paris, then returned to New York in 1953 to work as a freelance photojournalist for magazines including McCall’s, Vogue, and Fortune. Along with other contemporary photographers such as Saul Leiter and Diane Arbus, he helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 50s.       

 

Work: The Americans (1958)

Photographer Walker Evans was a major artistic influence for Robert Frank, and with his help Frank secured in 1955 a Guggenheim Fellowship; a grant awarded to established professionals to allow blocks of time in which to have as much creative freedom as possible, spending the money as they see fit. Frank’s project was to travel across the United States with his family and photograph all strata of society. Over the next two years he took 28,000 shots. 83 were selected to be included in his book The Americans. Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Frank met Beat writer Jack Kerouac, who would go on to write the introduction to the U.S. edition of the work. 
   

Frank’s photography in The Americans was at odds with what was considered a ‘good photograph’ at the time, due to his unusual focus, low lighting and cropping. Because of this divergence from contemporary photographic standards, Frank initially found difficulty securing a publisher. The work was first published in Paris in 1958 by Robert Delpire, and published a year later in the United States. It received substantial criticism, where the tone of the book was perceived as derogatory to national ideals. This criticism also came from Popular Photography who derided the technical quality of Frank’s images, citing ‘meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness. Sales were poor at first, but popular Kerouac’s introduction helped it reach a wider audience.

The Americans was a huge influence on future artists, and over time became a seminal work in American photography and art history, becoming Frank’s most famous work.

The Americans is considered a fresh and nuanced outsider’s view of American society, and are notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society, laying bare the anxieties that the chrome and the advertising jingles obscured. Sean O’Hagan writing in The Guardian said ‘[Frank’s] aim was to photograph America as it unfolded before his somewhat sombre outsider’s eye’. It presented a different viewpoint of the United States, and forced them to look at themselves in a very different way than they were used to. It was more truthful, but less glamorous and wonderful than they were used to thinking about themselves.

The images weren’t just representational, you felt and emphasised for these people. It’s raw; there’s a certain life to it that didn’t seem like a set up photograph.  America was a country in transition, beginning to feel that it had a lot of potential, a lot of world power and that everyone could work towards a really fantastic life. But the reality was closer to what Robert Frank was showing – a country that was segregated by race and class.

The term snapshot aesthetic is often used in reference to Frank’s work in The Americans – it feels informal. But it really was more than just the snapshot; he was very deliberate and fully aware of what he was photographing, making very conscious choices. He wanted his photographs to be more ambiguous, like poetry, so that the viewer would fill in the blanks. It’s visual poetry; you want to embrace it, you want to look at it again and again because there are so many layers of information and you want to experience that to its fullest extent.  

 

References

 

Museum of Photographic Arts, (2016). Streetwise - Robert Frank and The Americans. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_xJAd0piCM [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Smithsonian Magazine, (2016). Inside Photographer Robert Frank's The Americans. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHtRZBDOgag [Accessed 14 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Guggenheim Fellowship. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Fellowship [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Robert Frank. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). The Americans (photography). [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(photography) [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

The Genius of Photography. (2009). [DVD] BBC.