Robert Frank’s The Americans struck at the heart of how he saw his adopted country in the late 1950s. I recall seeing Frank’s images for the first time when I was in college. My roommate at the time considered some of them unpatriotic, a reaction that many people had at the time the book came out in the late 1950s.
I was not so sure. For some images, the theme of love for America (at least, how many Americans see themselves) seems present throughout. A large American flag dominating a portrait of the Fourth of July in Jay, New York, another flag in a US Navy recruiting station in Butte Montana, two figures in separate windows viewing a parade in Hoboken, New Jersey are three examples.
In other images, he explored tendencies that many individuals did not like to see: racism, materialism and the desire for power. Other images explore the struggles of poverty and isolation. Up until then, no one had really thought to snap a photo of a shoeshine station in a men’s room at a railway station in Memphis, Tennessee. Frank thought that was worthy of recording.
To be sure, Frank was clearly struck by the ingrained racism he found in America and spent a fair amount of effort documenting that. His images include an African American funeral in St. Helena, South Carolina and the striking scene of an African American nanny caring for a white child in Charleston, South Carolina.
Robert Ludlow, a New York-based journalist who frequently writes about photography, recently published his thoughts on one of the more popular images from the book: “Trolley — New Orleans,” which is on the cover. Ludlow describes the image in detail and points out that the image is divided into two rows of windows, each a frame in itself that divides the image up. For Ludlow, the image is all about the racial division of the time, something we clearly have not escaped. He points out that in the segregated South, African American riders on public transportation were moved to the back and the image shows the hierarchy of the era.
Other images in the book celebrate the mundane. A barber shop seen through a screen door in McLellanville, South Carolina, a diner in Hollywood, California and and an elevator operator in Miami Beach, Florida are three examples. The images also highlight the mobility of a restless nation. A mother and two children peering from a car in Butte, Montana, an empty highway of U.S. 285 in rural New Mexico, and the front seat of a moving automobile outside Blackfoot, Idaho are three examples of a country still trying to establish its identity.
His choice of movie premier in Hollywood and a drive cinema show the US obsession with fashion and celebrities dates back to at least the 1950s and the isolation of the celebrity. Jack Kerouac, who wrote the introduction to the book, said some images had never been seen before on film. That’s true, for some. Frank targeted scenes that were not previously deemed worthy to record. “For this, he will definitely be hailed as a great artist in his field,” Kerouac wrote.