by Francesco Tacconi
The Americans
Robert Frank,
introduction by Jack Kerouac,
Steidl, Göttingen 2008
“That crazy feeling in America when the
sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of
the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in the tremendous
photographs taken as he travelled on the road
around practically 48 states in an old used car
(on Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility,
mystery, genius, sadness, and strange secrecy of
a shadow photographed scenes that have never
been seen before on film. That is why Frank will
be considered one of the great photographers.
After seeing the pictures you don’t know what is
sadder, a jukebox or a coffin.” Who better than
Jack Kerouac, in his still very readable introduction
to Robert Frank’s photographic book The
Americans, could convey the emotions that we
continue to feel for this classic visual portrayal
of homo americanus. The book by the Swiss-born
but naturalised American photographer provoked
much criticism in American society when it was
published 50 years ago, on account of its far from
comforting content. But the enduring vitality of
this work has prompted German publisher Steidl to
celebrate the book’s 50th anniversary by putting
it in a box with an array of materials that illustrate
Robert Frank’s long career as a photographer and
filmmaker.
As well as some of Frank’s most famous
reportages (Paris; Perù), this box of wonders also
contains two stories for films (One Hour; Pull My
Daisy) and a DVD of his first film (Pull My Daisy,
1959). The latter – written and narrated by Allen
Ginsberg and featuring Ginsberg himself along
with Gregory Corso – was also his best-known
work done with poets of the beat generation and is
considered the first of the New American Cinema.
But the box also includes a CD with the work phases
of the “Robert Frank Project” with the publisher
Steidl; the Come again sketchbook (1992), which
is a post-it-like collage of black-and-white pictures
showing the destruction of Beirut; and even
a poster celebrating the half century that Robert
Frank’s The Americans has weathered very well.
“Anybody doesnt like these pitchers don’t like
potry, see?” says Kerouac in his aforementioned
introduction. In 1955 the young Frank was the
first European photographer to receive the annual
grant offered by the Guggenheim Foundation in
New York. Frank used the funds to travel across
most of the United States taking more than 24,000
photographs. In 1958 the French publisher Delpire
published Les Américains in Paris, a filtered selection
of just 83 pictures taken on Robert Frank’s
American tour. The following year, Grove Press
published the book in the United States with the
title The Americans.
Frank’s inquisitive, sensitive and probing
lens missed nothing. Managing to delve into every
stratum of American society with the discerning
eye of a radiologist, he passed with democratic
ease from the rural America of coloured farmhands
or workers on the assembly line of a Ford
plant, to a charity party attended by upper-class
New York ladies whiling away their time in elegant
society rituals.
The common thread running through these
pictures captured in such different contexts is the
sense of bewilderment and estranged solitude
that appears in the faces of these individuals pictured
in a variety of American public settings: in
the street, at the drive-in, on a bus, at the post
office, at a funeral, or at the start of the school
year.
Every photograph tells a story and is necessary
despite its surprisingly casual nature. Here
the Bresson poetic of the instant décisif seems to
be elevated to the maximum power. As a whole,
the photographs help to compose a mosaic of an
inter-class and multiethnic society, an anti-hero
epic of the large and complex nation that is the
United States. This book is fascinating at first
glance, as only true classics of any genre are able
to do. If Robert Frank described America as no one
before him had thought of doing, it is because his
lens focused on details of which only he was able
to grasp the existence. In conclusion we can only
cite the closing words of Kerouac, someone who
knew about the road: “Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive,
nice, with that little camera that he raises
and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem
right out of America onto film, taking rank among
the tragic poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now
give this message: you got eyes.”
Robert Frank’s Photographs
The AmericansRobert Frank, introduction by Jack Kerouac, Steidl, Göttingen 2008 “That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in the tremendous photographs taken as he travelled on the road around practically 48 states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) (...)":
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- 22 December 2008