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.”