Chattanooga, Tennessee. Copyright © Robert Frank
In post-war American photography, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more influential book than Robert Frank’s 1958 masterpiece, The Americans. In it, Frank, an emigrant from Switzerland, details his cross-country trip through the United States with 83 stirring portraits of every corner of American society. His style and subject matter shocked and appalled critics, but with the help of friends like Jack Kerouac, William de Kooning and Allen Ginsberg, his work became an inspiration for generations of photographers to follow.
On his trip through the U.S., Frank effectively captured the contradictions existing between the glamors and realities of American life, between wealth, race and economic class. His focus on these tensions was highlighted by a unique style. His subjects were always off-center, or the lighting was poor, giving his work a dusty, gritty, haphazard feel. This new technique was unprecedented.
Unfortunately, such an abrupt style rubbed contemporary photographers and journalists the wrong way, and Frank’s book was ridiculed almost instantly. One critic even called his photos a “meaningless blur,” full of “drunken horizons and general sloppiness.”
But, in his new book, Photography After Frank, New York Times columnist Philip Gefter argues that Frank’s work was not meaningless. In fact, it was nothing short of groundbreaking.
“Robert Frank basically liberated the picture frame,” said Gefter in an interview with NPR. “[Frank was] aiming for a sort of poetic immediacy of experience in the work itself. like [Jack] Kerouac, he liberates the photo frame from the traditional compositional symmetry. That characterizes the divide of what I see as the photography before Robert Frank.” Indeed, Kerouac may have been the one who helped Frank on his feet. The two met on the sidewalk outside a party, and after seeing his photos, Kerouac agreed to pen an introduction.
Since then, The Americans has become one of the great cultural touchstones in American art. In describing his own work, Frank just wanted to show people something meaningful. “When people look at my pictures,” he once said, “I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
And now you may have a chance to see Frank’s pictures, up close and personal. In commemoration of the book’s 50th anniversary this year, the complete set of original photos will be on tour with displays at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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