"It is difficult to remember how shocking
Robert Frank's book was," the late, great John
Szarkowski wrote in 1968, having curated an earlier
show of the work at New York's Museum
of Modern Art. "The pictures took us by ambush then ...
He established a new iconography for contemporary America, comprised of bits of
bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and
unknowable faces."
Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian, 30th November 2009
I have been looking at Robert Frank's The Americans as I recently bought the book.
It is is such a famous collection and so much of an influence on most
photographers that I thought it was about time I got round to doing so.
Briefly, Robert Frank, was a Swiss national born in 1924 who
emigrated to America in 1947. He worked at Harper's Bazaar before travelling in
South America and Europe, and then returned to America where he became
established as one of a group of successful photographers including Diane
Airbus. He was heavily influenced and guided by Walker Evans, and in 1955 with
his help, secured a Guggenheim Fellowship allowing him to travel across the
States.
"Frank, then in his early 30s, shot 500 rolls of film on
three separate road trips across America, with his first wife and two young
children in tow. It was a dogged and exhausting undertaking, even with the
assistance of the Guggenheim fellowship that helped fund it." (1)
Although he shot 500 rolls only 84 images made it into the final
book and according to Sean O'Hagan when you look at his contact sheets you will
be amazed by his precision. He took very few shots at each scene and
although the final edited image may not have been the most conventionally
framed it is often as close to perfect in terms of being a decisive moment.
Controversy
surrounded the book's publication. Frank's view was not the optimistic
vision that people were used to seeing although on the surface it was the style
that was criticised, as a quote I found on the Wiki site suggests:
'Popular Photography, for one, derided his images as "meaningless
blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness"'.
Bet they felt clever shortly afterwards - although sales started slowly
it quickly became popular and is now one of the most influential photography books of
the 20th century.
When I looked at
the book I was intrigued by all the style and subject choices which I see in so
many photographers' work today. But what's even more fascinating really
is how very powerful his work is in transporting you to the time and place.
Although I was not in 50's America something happened to my senses and I
was transported there; moments from my own childhood in South Africa, in the
hot, dusty outbacks of Jo'burg flooded back into my mind and I could almost
hear the buzz of the surrounding landscape and smell something of it too. I suspect there will have been some similarities between SA backwater
'dorps' and the small American towns Frank visited.
Butte, Montana
- an image of a woman in a car with children in the back all looking out
the window is just great. I love the expression on the woman's face - you
get such a strong sense of what she is feeling and I'm desperate to know who
they are all looking at like that. The famous bus image which is on the
cover of the book, named Trolley - New Orleans is fascinating, not only because
of the faces and the racial segregation; a site, I imagine, that is far more
shocking to modern eyes than it was to the people who first saw these images. (My first-hand experience of racial segregation perhaps makes it even more acute
for me than it might otherwise be.) But also because, for me anyway, of
the extraordinary reflections and shapes and patterns on the bus especially
above the windows. It's like there is another world just out of touch, of
ghosts and ghouls hovering above the unsuspecting passengers. View from
hotel window - Butte, Montana is wonderful to look at. I can really sense
the inside of the hotel room from the style of the curtains and the way the window has been photographed looking out over the industrial looking town. I love the
way Yom Kipper, East River, is composed. It is so unconventional with
nearly all the the people facing the opposite way, with very little of the
faces we do see visible. So much personality is recognisable in the hats
and postures, and the hope and excitement in the little boy's profile is very
clear. I like the movement and atmosphere in Assembly line, Detroit -
this will have been one of the images that the magazine Popular Photography
found so difficult to take, I imagine. Image after image throughout the
book is so powerful, interesting and revealing about American culture.
It's a visual anthropological essay - although I know there are issues
over how objective or subjective anthropologists are when in the field - and
Frank has without any doubt recorded his own view of America but that of course
is what makes it so resonant and artistic. He sees the sadness, the
mournful, the fake and the trouble that is very much at odds with the self
perception of America at the time. As an outsider he notices things
people inside might not and takes the time to photograph and publish what he
sees. And so much of it so quotidian and mundane but his rendering of it
is extraordinary and fascinating.
I'm glad I finally
have the book and will of course be looking at many, many times again.
Guardian article by Sean O'Hagan
