Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ – A Political Lens on America

“The Americans” Photographs by Robert Frank, Introduction by Jack Kerouac

How serendipitous is it that the newly published edition of Robert Frank’s iconic book The Americans should arrive in the same week as one of the most significant and potentially world changing American elections of all time.

Frank’s book, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac, was first published in 1958, coincidentally the year of my birth. Its origins are now well known, in photographic circles at least. Frank had obtained a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1955 to travel across America photographing its people and its places in all social levels. He undertook a number of road trips between 1955 and 1956, during which time he created 28,000 images with just 83 selected by him in what became a landmark book.

Looking at The Americans now, 66 years later, some of the images look almost amateurish in their composition (e.g. Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey) whilst others definitely deserve the label ‘iconic’ (e.g. U.S. 285, New Mexico). However looking more deeply at the book as a whole one soon realises that the theme of the book (i.e. American society and culture of the mid-fifties) is superbly captured. It does not matter that some of the images are blurred, grainy or composed in a way that makes you suspect they were ‘grabbed’ rather than composed. What matters is that they capture a way of life that was changing irrevocably.

This was an America post-second world war (where it had done a great deal to bring stability to Europe) but also one in which the Cold War was underway (but yet to have reached its more significant point in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962), the full horrors of the war in Vietnam were yet to unfold and the rampant commercialisation of Western society was only just beginning.

This was a time of great racial divide and clear differences between parts of American society, both of which Frank captured so well. It was also before the huge current day issues of globalisation, neoliberalism, climate change and, of course, the Internet and social media had all taken hold.

The Americans is a snapshot of a country which, in some ways has gone, but in others, at least in part, is still very much alive. Look at Assembly line – Detroit or Men’s room, railway station – Memphis, Tennessee or any of the numerous images of bars and cafes and you’ll understand what I mean. These are all scenes and places you’ll see today but now there will be brand names and logos festooned everywhere but the people that populate these places will be no better off or feel they have more meaningful lives than they did then.

Which of course brings us to the current time and place. Many of the people that are to be found in Frank’s photographs of fifties America are now the ones who occupy twenties America and who, through no fault of their own, are being seduced by the lies and false promises of the fascist Trump who preys on their poverty and their insecurity to win their votes and impose on the Americans his own warped agenda.

I wonder what a current Robert Frank would uncover if they were to embark on a similar road trip today? Although we are bombarded with images like never before (the 28,000 images that he took are probably uploaded to Instagram every few seconds today) I doubt what we see would be such a cohesive, intimate and intentional set of photographs.

In many ways, as Kerouac intimates in his introduction, Frank is more of a “tragic poet” than a photographer:

“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.”
Jack Kerouac

If you are a modern-day photographer with any interest in making the kind of social documentary images that Frank has done then I strongly recommend you buy or borrow The Americans to see how influential it was then and still is today.