With 1959’s “The Americans,” Robert Frank changed the art of photography, and opened a new window onto the soul of our nation. Now, for the first time, The Met features the project in its own comprehensive exhibit. Larry Getlen finds out how “The Americans” became such an essential cultural touchstone.
In the age of a camera in every pocket and at a time when the average twentysomething has hundreds of drunken party photos on Facebook, it can be hard to imagine photos of everyday people in unremarkable settings having a deep cultural impact.
Trolley — New Orleans, 1955 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005). © Robert Frank, from “The Americans”
But in 1959, Robert Frank created a book featuring 83 photos of just this sort that had a shocking effect on society.
That year, Grove Press released Frank’s “The Americans,” a collection of photos culled from over 27,000 pictures Frank took — on 767 rolls of film — while driving cross-country throughout 1955 and 1956.
The book’s cover features a photo of people on a trolley car looking out the windows toward the photographer. The whites sit in the front; the blacks in the back. While the controversy today would lie in that very fact, at the time, Frank’s photographs were taken by many as an indictment of America itself for casting the country in a negative light. Our nation was fraught with racism, sexism, abuse of authority, and financial inequities, but in the age of Eisenhower, such topics weren’t discussed in polite company, and they weren’t yet depicted in popular art.
Plus, in the world of professional or artistic photography, photos that weren’t crisp, well-lit, and presented in a chipper narrative form were often disregarded. Frank’s photos, therefore, were denounced as either technically and artistically flawed, downright unpatriotic, or both.
It was only by the 1960s, as civil rights came to the forefront and culture began to include elements of society that had previously been swept under the rug, that Frank’s work was regarded anew. By decade’s end, Robert Frank’s “The Americans” had come to be known as the most groundbreaking photographic work of our age, a status it retains to this day.
Now, on the 50th anniversary of its American publication (it debuted in France as “Les Américains” one year earlier), Frank’s seminal work is being presented in a major artistic exhibition, in its entirety, for the first time. “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans,” which runs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until January 3, presents exquisite black-and-white prints of all 83 photos from “The Americans” in sequential order, plus some of Frank’s contact sheets and personal correspondence, and examples of his earlier and later work.
Funeral — St. Helena, South Carolina, 1955 (Susan and Peter MacGill) © Robert Frank, from “The Americans”
Prior to the publication of “The Americans,” even top photographers treated their subjects with a certain emotional distance. Frank was the first to empathize with his subjects on a deep personal level.
“Frank was able to find new ways of making pictures that were beyond pure reportage,” says Jeff Rosenheim, Curator of Photographs at the Met. “The fifties were a time of revolutions in style and content, and that’s the thing that makes ‘The Americans’ so great — that he discovered new subjects, and new ways to depict those subjects. He talked about how things felt to him, and photographed from the heart.”
Frank’s willingness to emotionally place himself in his work set him apart from even the best photographers of the day, such as Frank’s mentor, the former picture editor at Fortune magazine, Walker Evans.
“The camera in Evans’ hands was this objective tool which had a very careful distance from the subject,” says Rosenheim. “Frank wanted something very different. He wanted to really feel the subject viscerally, and transmit the feeling of how he felt traveling the country to the viewers.”
But Frank’s prescient ambition hit hard at a time when the country, in the midst of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Commie-baiting madness, was settled into an identity both conformist and fearful. Frank, a Swiss Jew, experienced this first-hand when he was arrested in Arkansas for naught but the crime of being foreign and speaking Yiddish. During his detention, Arkansas police grilled him about whether or not he was a Communist.
When the book was released, many felt it was downright un-American, with critics calling it “a slashing and bitter attack on some U.S. institutions” and “a degradation of a nation.”
“It was controversial for the honesty with which Frank depicted the American scene,” says Rosenheim. “He made pictures that revealed not the idealism of the American experience, but the reality of it — the reality of segregation, and of the distance between rich and poor, young and old, black and white. The reality is, we were living through a time with a lot of fears. Postwar America, the events of the period, and the fear of the Soviet Union created a fear of people who were different. It didn’t help that Frank was not an American.”
While the book was trashed for its artistic and political sensibilities, it was also taken to task for artistic advances that were, at the time, perceived as flaws.
Elevator — Miami Beach, 1955 (Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1969) © Robert Frank, from “The Americans”
Popular Photography Magazine cited the “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness” of the photos. As it turns out, what the magazine took for sloppiness and mud were innovations teeming with artistic purpose.
“He used graphic innovation and burned-out highlights, super-dark shadows, and tilted horizons,” says Rosenheim, “not for purely formal reasons, but to invoke this feeling of visceral presence — the presence of the artist in the scene.”
Frank, who shot with a 35mm Leica camera, intentionally shunned a flash or tripod, and often shot just several yards from his subjects, hoping to catch the sort of truth that belies neat lines and perfect exposures. This, too, was an artistic innovation, and a bold one at that.
“You need to be courageous to be at one or two meters from people,” says director Philippe Séclier, who just released a documentary called “An American Journey” in which he replicated Frank’s 15,000-mile trek. “There is a picture in the book from San Francisco where you see a black couple, and the man is very upset when he discovers that Robert Frank took a picture. So you can imagine how difficult it was to take more than 20,000 photos.”
Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955 (Private collection, San Francisco). © Robert Frank, from “The Americans”
The book’s smashing of existing photographic convention comes to light in its very first photo. “Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey” (above) shows two women standing in the windows of their neighboring apartments. An American flag hangs from the building’s brick wall — only the bottom half is visible in frame — and it obscures one of the women’s faces. The other woman’s face, meanwhile, resides in shadow. The meaning of the photograph (as with the project itself, or any great art) is oft debated and far from concrete. But before Frank, it’s unlikely that any photographer would have dared show the flag with anything less than reverence. The title, the hidden faces, the brick of the building, the flag — all combine to create an artistic mystery, and one that is merely 1/83 of a considerably larger enigma.
Frank’s take on America is one that much of the country was unprepared to absorb. The next photo in the book, for example, “City Fathers — Hoboken, New Jersey,” shows men in fine wool coats and top hats or fedoras. They are perched along a grandstand, possibly at the same parade being watched by the women in the first photo, and they look anything but distinguished. The faces of several are dead with apathy. The men seem almost propped up — certainly not authoritative or regal. And the final man in line, for reasons unknown, has his eyes closed and lips pursed, as if blowing a kiss to a nonexistent admirer, or perhaps telling the ladies in the first photo to kiss off.
Throughout the book, the rich are shot as pompous, the poor and black with dignity, and the flag as mere backdrop. Even the title, “The Americans,” rankled some, as it seemed to imply that the faults depicted in the book reflected on the entire nation. In reality, the title was picked by the book’s publisher, not Frank, and was basically an afterthought.
In seeking to make a personal statement, Frank also broke ground with how the finished product was less a collection than a wholly unified work. After spending a year going through the more than one thousand work prints he spread along the walls and floors of his East Village apartment, the completed book was intended as a meaningful sequence.
“The book is like a movie — you can see the type of similar sequences you never saw before,” says Séclier. “When curators, photographers, and artists tried to understand the book, they had a fascination with the sequences. For example, the fact that the book opens with an American flag, and there are four flags in the book. It’s very important in the history of photography to see that this book is presented like a movie.”
And if the photographic world slowly caught on to Frank’s innovations, by the late ’60s the country itself was also much more open to his message.
“What Frank was witnessing was this sort of isolationist ’50s, and what realities there were,” says Rosenheim. “By the 1960s, many of the things that Frank revealed — not just the racism in the country and the alienation of youth, but how politicians served the country and did not — those things were questioned. It was the beginning of the civil rights era and our militarization in Southeast Asia, as well as protests against Vietnam, and all these things led to a search for authentic depictions of the people and the seeds of change. And Frank had recorded it.”
“Rodeo — New York City, 1954.” Collection of Barbara and Eugene Schwartz. © Robert Frank, from “The Americans”
Living in the East Village, Frank spent much of his time around the development of the project with artistic compatriots such Evans, who helped him craft the application for the Guggenheim grant that eventually funded it; poet Allen Ginsberg; and painter Willem de Kooning. Not surprisingly, then, New York played a major role in both the development of Frank’s artistic sensibility and in the project itself, and eight of the 83 pictures were shot here in the city, such as the photo on our contents page of the cowboy standing near Madison Square Garden (then located at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue).
For Rosenheim, the shots of the city reveal Frank’s perception of how the density of New York can create unique emotional vacuums.
“The glowing jukebox, the one in the bar scene,” he says of the photo simply titled “Bar — New York City.” “It’s pretty empty, and there’s an empty floor with the left arm of a figure we can’t see. This says that we live in this unbelievably dense place where there are people everywhere, and yet we’re alone here. Despite the fact that the street is filled to the brim with humanity, that can often leave us alienated from our space. That loneliness is the loneliness that resides in density.”
It that sense and others, viewing the exhibit makes it clear — especially considering our country’s current economic hardships — that the issues Frank confronted in his work are often just as relevant today.
“The America of Robert Frank in the 1950s is really the same now,” says Séclier. “If you open the book, you see things that you can discover in 2009 — racism, religion, politics, [the distance between] rich and poor. The book is very, very modern.”
Frank shifted his interests toward filmmaking just as “The Americans” was gaining recognition, and rarely has talked about the work publicly, although he did make one appearance for the Met. But great art speaks for itself, and now, with this first-ever exhibit featuring “The Americans” in its entirety, we all have a chance to appreciate a work that impacted not just the art of photography, but the very nature of America.
“Frank went out of his way to photograph people who had never been shown as being important,” says Rosenheim. “That level of honesty is what makes the book fantastic for us today.”
“Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans” runs until January 3, 2010, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street). Call 212-535-7710, or visit metmuseum.org for more information.
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