When Robert Frank’s controversial book of photographs, The Americans, first came out in the late 1950’s, in France and the US, it was the result of two years of Kerouac-style exploration on the back roads of American life. Fueled by a hefty Guggenheim grant, Swiss-born Frank traveled across the country like his literary counterparts, the Beats, training his camera on what might seem like inconsequential moments in his adopted country – a group of men waiting by their cars at a funeral in the South, a solitary woman laughing rapturously in an open field, a black nanny cradling an alien-like white infant and anonymous Hoboken citizens staring down from behind closed windows with their faces obscured by the flag. All shot in flat ‘neutral’ lighting, seemingly unposed, yet shrewdly calculated to throw mud in the eye of the country’s Technicolor idealism.

The response to Frank’s work at the time was stinging, branding him as an outlaw while catapulting him to the ranks of his American predecessors, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, who’d left more privileged lives behind to document the forgotten corners of a burgeoning 20th century superpower.

The exhibition is smartly laid out in the order of the book, prefaced by earlier work from France and Peru, and grim shots of smudged Welsh miners contrasted with a glorious haunting image of men in top hats on a foggy London street that looks straight from a dream.  Mixed media work and a film by Frank near the exit bring home the fact that he eventually quit photography to reject his ensuing fame.

Letters to Frank’s mentor, Walker Evans, scrawled on retro-50’s hotel stationary and a furiously typed manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s introduction to the book are presented in glass cases as precious artifacts. A collage of outtakes, contact sheets and work prints with crop marks suggest that despite its offhand appearance, extensive planning, editing and revising of The Americans took place.

Viewing the images in sequence allows one to appreciate Frank’s scathing juxtapositions of a MOMA garden cocktail party next to a dingy men’s room in Tennessee, and an elegant covered car followed by a shrouded traffic accident corpse. Kerouac’s comment that “after seeing these photographs, you end up not knowing whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin” provides apt commentary for a mordantly beautiful string of found moments. And seeing the actual black and white prints up close makes one realize the inadequacy of reproductions.

Frank’s keen observational eye and rueful irony still manage to sing amidst hoards of casual observers, although I’d recommend seeing it late on a Saturday night after the crowds have thinned. Like the work of Charles Dickens, whose brutal sarcasm unveiled disparities between the classes, The Americans, which influenced generations of street photographers and foreshadowed the political discontent of the 60’s and 70’s, feels compromised by its new surroundings, but will not turn to stone.

--Kirsten Bengtson-Lykoudis

Images: Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955, Gelatin silver print, Private collection, San Francisco; U.S. 285, New Mexico, 1955, Gelatin silver print, Collection Mark Kelman; New York; Trolley—New Orleans, 1955, Gelatin silver print, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005 (2005.100.454). All Images © Robert Frank, from The Americans.