Photography
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The photographer who captured America's dark side
In an interview, Joel Meyerowitz recounts his pivotal encounter with Robert Frank. Joel was an art director responsible for producing a publication about Robert Frank. It was then that he decided to casually observe Frank, whom he knew nothing about, during a work session. Frank had two young girls whom he guided with few words. Joel stood behind them and observed the photographer's movements as he followed them. Observing the process, he noticed Frank's anticipation and the rhythmic sequence of the image capture. The photographer captures small moments of revelation, a visual revelation. Small gestures seem to have the potential to communicate emotion. Joel senses the moment the image is captured, synchronous with the two girls' gestures. He understands the photographer's anticipation, ready to capture the human energy expressed through movement. The camera transforms movement into a poetic revelation.
This is his moment of transformation. Joel discovers that the world is flooded with movements, gestures waiting to be captured.
He returns to his office and tells his boss when he arrives: I'm quitting my job, I want to become a photographer.
The Imperfect Photograph
Born in Switzerland in 1924, Robert Frank grew up in a society on the verge of collapse. Before his 15th birthday, he witnessed the stock market crash, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Jews like his father losing their citizenship, and the Nazis invading Poland. Paradoxically, Frank's biggest complaint as a teenager was that the country was so small, so quiet, and so dull that he desperately wanted to get out.
When Frank was 17, an opportunity presented itself to him. A professional photo retoucher named Hermann Segesser lived upstairs from his family's residence. One day, the teenager visited him. "I want to learn what you do," Frank said.
Segesser took Frank under his wing, teaching him how to work a camera, develop negatives, make prints, and retouch photos. For the next five years, Frank informally studied photography with Segesser and other Swiss photographers, building a portfolio of "40 photos" that he hoped would be his ticket out of Switzerland.
Departure for America
In February 1947, Frank sailed for New York with his photography portfolio. He hadn't intended to stay in New York long, says Sarah Greeough in her book Looking In. But he fell in love with the city's energy. "I've never experienced so much in a week as I have here," he wrote to his parents. "I feel like I'm in a movie."
Life felt even more like a movie when he landed a contract as a photographer at Harper's Bazaar. At 22, Frank had already realized his dream: he was getting paid to take pictures. But shooting handbags and belts for the magazine's fashion section quickly became tedious.
Frank was frustrated by the publishers' control over his photos. Disillusionment quickly set in. After only a month, he resigned.
Around the world
That's when he began to wander. For six years, Frank traveled the world, stopping in Peru, Panama, Paris, London, and Wales. He got married. And he continued to perfect his style, taking pictures of what he loved. Most of his photos were light, soft, and romantic, and he dreamed of selling them to major magazines like LIFE, writes Jonathan Day in his book Robert Frank's The Americans: The Art of Documentary Photography.
Back in New York
This time, the scene he found in New York was different. Frank had a Swiss friend, a designer named Herbert Matter, who was interested in abstract painters like Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock. Frank was enamored with their world. His Greenwich Village apartment was in a hippie wonderland. He met Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, as well as Walker Evans , who was famous for his photographs of the Great Depression.
Frank took photographs through it all, absorbing everything he could from his new community. From the abstract painters, he learned to embrace ambiguity and chance, to “follow my intuition, no matter how crazy or remote or how much I was laughed at,” he said. The Beats encouraged him to treat photography like a jazz solo: spontaneous, raw, rooted in the moment. Most importantly, the photographers taught him to hate commercial photography.
The standards of the time
In the 1950s, photographs were crisp, sharp, and clean. A photo was only perfect if it followed traditional rules of composition. Images were generally optimistic, especially in popular magazines promoting the American way of life.
This aesthetic reached its peak in 1955, when the Museum of Modern Art's curator of photography, Edward Steichen, presented an exhibition titled "The Family of Man." A display of 503 photographs from over 60 countries, it depicted the great human race as the same everywhere. Dubbed the "greatest photographic exhibition of all time," war and poverty were seen as minor imperfections in the course of human history.
But Frank, who had lived in Europe during World War II and visited the poorest parts of South America, had known something else. "I knew I was living in a different world, that the world wasn't as good as this, that it was a myth that the sky was blue everywhere and that all photographs were beautiful," Frank said in 1989.
Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
With a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, Frank headed west in June 1955. His network of famous friends had helped him secure the grant, and the money in his wallet meant he could do whatever he wanted.
Robert Frank's Grand Road Trip to the American West
With nowhere in particular to go, he drove. He stayed in cheap hotels and started each morning, wherever he was, by grabbing his 35mm Leica and photographing the nearest bar or Woolworths.
Keeping in mind Allen Ginsberg's mantra about spontaneity, "first thought, best thought," he took two or three photos at each location and moved on. Then he visited the post office, bus and train stations, the cemetery, and convenience stores. He went wherever strangers gathered and tried to blend in. He rarely spoke to the people he photographed.
Robert Frank's Great Journey
By documenting the little things, Robert Frank changed an entire nation's image of itself.
The photographs in Robert Frank's The Americans are so ordinary that you might not see what makes them extraordinary. They show people eating, sitting, driving, waiting, and that's it. The subjects rarely look at the camera. When they do, they seem annoyed. Many of the photographs are blurry, grainy, and blotchy with shadows.
But the devil is in the details: Together, the images comprise a skeptical portrait, an outsider's view of a country that was, at the time, overconfident.
But the devil is in the details: Together, the images comprise a skeptical portrait, an outsider's view of a country that was, at the time, overconfident.
As Ginsberg recounts, by the time a weary Frank reached Detroit, he wrote to his wife, Mary, that he just wanted to "lie down anywhere possible and not think about photographs. Then his car broke down, and he couldn't resist using the extra time to photograph an African-American concert, where he was pulled over for having two license plates.
This wasn't the last time Frank got into trouble, especially when he traveled further south. At the Arkansas border, he was accosted for no particular reason by a sheriff who pulled out a stopwatch and gave him five minutes to leave the state.
In Port Gibson, Mississippi, a group of teenagers harassed Frank, calling him a communist. In McGehee, Arkansas, state police stopped his car on the highway. When the officers looked in the car window, seeing suitcases and cameras—and hearing Frank's foreign accent—they suspected he was a spy. They demanded that Frank hand over his film, briefly jailing him when he refused. Before his release, Frank was required to sign his name under the criminal heading. This infuriated him, and his empathy for those treated unfairly grew. "America is an interesting country," he wrote to his parents. "There is a lot to see here. I don't like everything I see and would never accept it. I try to show that in my photographs."
Frank's original goal was to photograph everyday Americans going about their daily lives. But the further he traveled across the South, the more his viewfinder fell upon people seemingly forgotten by the American Dream. Increasingly, he captured an America everyone knew existed but preferred not to see; he searched for what had been forgotten and saw the weariness in his subjects' eyes.
It didn't matter whether Frank caught people standing around a jukebox or a coffin, his camera captured the same look on everyone's face. People looked sideways, looked up, looked at their feet, looked everywhere, but never at each other.
In Miami Beach, an impatient elevator operator, stuck pressing buttons for strangers all day, stared into space. In Detroit, working-class men ate at a lunch counter, ignoring their neighbors and staring straight ahead. In New Orleans, a Black-only streetcar passed as a Black man with a sad expression stared directly into Frank's lens.
Meeting Jack Kerouac
On a hot September day in 1957, Jack Kerouac sat on a New York sidewalk looking at the photographs of photographer Robert Frank.
Like Kerouac, who had just published "On the Road," Frank had just completed a historic road trip across America. He had driven from New York to Detroit, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, photographing most of the major American cities he visited.
Frank wanted to produce a book and wanted to invite Kerouac to write an introduction.
That's how the two met at a party, sitting on the sidewalk looking at these photos together.
Quack looked at Frank's pictures: there were cowboys and cars, jukeboxes, tattered flags, cemeteries and shoeshine boys, politicians and prayer groups. Kerouac was captivated by the idea. For him, the pictures were more than just a representation of the real America.
Frank, with these black and white photographs, had "captured the true nature of humankind."
He agreed to write a text to accompany it. “It will be a wonderful poem,” he told Frank. “You have a good eye.”
Collecting the images hadn't been easy. Frank had traveled more than 10,000 miles to capture these photos. Along the way, he used 767 rolls of film and endured two prison stints. He knew the photos were good. But he hadn't imagined he would change the course of photography and how people perceived the country.
Robert Frank's Vision
Frank's work stands in direct contrast to the smiling humanity of Steichen's exhibition, "The Family of Man." He is compared to Steichen, but he wasn't angered by it; he was even moved. "I had a feeling of compassion for the people on the street," he told Dennis Wheeler in 1977. He saw beauty in highlighting the truth, however banal, sad, or small. There was something distinctly American, worthy of celebration, about giving a voice to the voiceless. For Americans, these scenes were too ordinary to be noticed.
But the eyes of an outsider like Frank saw how they affected and influenced daily life. Automobiles, especially. For Frank, few things defined American life more than the automobile. They were places to sleep, eat, see a movie, have fun, travel, wait, make love, and, for some, die. Above all, cars were a way for Americans to isolate themselves.
After nine months, he had traveled more than 10,000 miles across more than 30 states. In total, he had taken 27,000 photographs. When he returned to New York in 1956, he reduced these images to 1,000 large-format prints. He displayed these photos on the walls of his apartment. After four months, he had chosen 83 for his book "The Americans."
Publication of the collection "The Americans" in 1958 in France
According to Jack Kerouac, Frank had "pulled (sucked) a sad poem straight out of America onto the film." But the critics weren't so accommodating. When the volume was first published in Paris, it attracted little attention. But the American edition, published in 1959 with Kerouac's introduction, angered them. The bottom line, the critics said, was that "The Americans" was anti-American.
Minor White described it as "a totally deceptive move! The degeneration of a nation!" Bruce Downes denigrated Frank as a "joyless man who hates his adopted country" and a "liar, who perversely revels in misery." John Durniak called him a "warty picture of America. If this is America, we should burn it down and start again."
“The Americans,” after all, was the opposite of what readers were used to seeing in the Saturday Evening Post or an episode of Leave It to Beaver. There were no white picket fences, no apple pies cooling on windowsills. Not a single image would be inspired by a comforting Norman Rockwell painting.
It was completely different from the superficial, wholesome, and patriotic photo essays everyone was used to. As idyllic as the critics believed it to be, America was grappling with disturbing issues: McCarthyism, segregation, poverty, and the Cold War. America was as lonely as it was great, and Frank had captured glimpses of all of this.
Like the hard-to-swallow message, critics chose to stifle Frank's style. "The Americans" contained everything a good photographer was supposed to avoid. Arthur Goldsmith of Popular Photography called it "derailed by meaningless blur, excessive grain, rough exposure, tilted horizons, and general sloppiness in composition."
But Frank, inspired by the abstract painters he admired, had been ambiguous by choice, Day writes. A troubled nation deserved flawed photographs. Composition was as unstable as the American dream. More concretely, blur, shadows, and odd angles frame the details that traditional fine-tuning techniques have led viewers to overlook.
In one photo, a starlet walks down a red carpet, her face completely blurred. Our gaze drifts to the haggard fans standing behind the velvet ropes, one of them nervously biting his nails. Frank's technique highlighted the details we tend to overlook. He saw the people on the fringes as the real stars.
Following an outcry from critics, the book was largely ignored. Only 1,100 copies were sold, earning Frank $817.12. He abandoned photography and began filmmaking (his most famous film was a 1972 documentary about the Rolling Stones).
The times they are a-changin
Bob Dylan's universally acclaimed song, "The Times They Are a-Changin'," is an anthem for the change of a society emerging from conformity and the rule of conventional society. Ungrammatical language makes it the perfect imperfect song, packed with powerful emotions and a powerful message.
In 1964, Bob Dylan released his anthem for social change, which began to resonate across America. Social change accelerated as resistance to the Vietnam War (1955–1975) began to be clearly expressed. Black rights movements began to organize.
The emergence of a new vocal generation heralds great changes in society.
In this respect, Frank's book offers a new vision of American society, and its author is a visionary. In the late 1960s, politicians and activists were interested in everything Frank had described: discrimination, stultifying work environments, poverty, inequality, racial tensions.
The New York School
He clearly influenced the new generation of East Coast photographers, known as the "New York School." Street photographers such as Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander were inspired by his crushing honesty.
In a 2009 interview with NPR, legendary street photographer Joel Meyerowitz said, "It was the vision that emanated from the book that inspired not only myself, but my entire generation of photographers."
Today, "The Americans" is regularly hailed as the most influential photography book of the 20th century.
More importantly, the book is no longer perceived as anti-American. Having grown up on a continent steeped in wartime propaganda, Frank loved the freedom the United States offered him as an artist—nowhere else did he have so much freedom to experiment so wildly and photograph so honestly.
“General opinion often consists of a kind of criticism,” he said in 1958. “But that kind of criticism can come from love.” Discovering the ugly side of America was Frank’s way of getting the land he loved to face its problems and change. Photographing ordinary life was a way of communicating, of celebrating not just the little things, but the everyday lives of people. What could be more American?
Final word: the perfection of imperfect art
Patti Smith performs Bob Dylan's song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" at the 2016 Nobel Prize ceremony.
An illustration of imperfect photography: Patti Smith's performance at the 2016 Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. For the occasion, she performed Bob Dylan's song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" accompanied by a single acoustic guitar. The brief moment when Patti Smith has a memory lapse makes her all the more fascinating and profound for the entire audience. For Patti Smith, it's an opportunity to pull herself together and deliver an intense and sincere performance, where emotion is on the surface. An imperfect performance that delivers strong emotions and an intense human connection.
Joel Meyerowitz, the day I met Robert Frank, Nov 2020, Phaidon
Joel Meyerowitz's account of the moment of enlightenment when he decided that photography would become his career. His photographic inspiration was to capture the revealing moment of an emotion, without much regard for aesthetic rules.
First published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959—in the midst of the Cold War—Robert Frank's The Americans is among the most influential photography books of the 20th century. The Addison is one of only four museums in the world to own a complete set of images from the book.
In 1955–56, a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled the Swiss-born photographer to travel across the United States. His goal was to create a book he described as a “visual study of a civilization.” Frank’s dark, grainy images are the work of an observing outsider. In doing so, he reveals his ambivalence about his adopted country. The eighty-three carefully sequenced photographs, edited from more than twenty-seven thousand, are the raw documentation of a country in transition. They celebrate its strengths as an emerging superpower while revealing the cracks in the veneer of optimism and opportunity that defined its postwar culture. As Jack Kerouac wrote in the book’s introduction, “Robert Frank, Swiss, quiet, kind, with that little camera he raises and shoots with one hand. He has swallowed a sad poem straight out of America onto his film.”
Frank's unsentimental vision of a modern America that seemed strikingly lonely and dislocated was initially challenged by critics. However, the honest and poignant beauty captured in these images and his distinctly expressive and visceral style were quickly embraced by younger photographers. It is more than a revelation of a specific moment in American history or a manifesto for a new photographic style. The Americans is a resonant work that probes the definitive and enduring dualities of American life and culture—hope and despair, wealth and desire, freedom and limitation, community and isolation. Exploring the gap between appearance and actuality, national ideals and regional specificity, American myth and street-level reality, these provocative and nuanced images ask, What is America?
References
Henri Cartier-Bresson / Highway Cyclorama
• https://www.magnumphotos.com/events/event/henri-cartier-bresson-america/
• https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/politics/henri-cartier-bresson-america-in-passing/
• https://www.henricartierbresson.org/en/expositions/henri-cartier-bresson-walker-evans-2/
Cartier-Bresson traveled to the United States in 1935 with an invitation to exhibit his work at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, along with photographers Walker Evans and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Carmel Snow, director of Harper's Bazaar, offered him an invitation to shoot fashion. The results were disappointing, as he didn't know how to direct models. However, Snow published Cartier-Bresson's photographs in the magazine. While in New York, he met photographer Paul Strand, who published his Depression-era work, The Plow That Broke the Plains.
The man who saw America , New York Times, 2015
Lens Culture , book review, 2008
The shock of Robert Frank’s “The Americas”