Robert Frank and Two Babies: "The Americans" at the Met (2010)

To many photography critics and historians, Robert Frank's Americans (1958, France; 1960, U.S.) marks a watershed moment in twentieth-century photography. With money awarded to him via a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank traveled throughout the continental United States from 1955 to 1957. From the approximately 27,000 exposures he made and the thousands of contact sheets lie scrutinized, Frank developed 1,000 work prints, from which he selected eighty-three final prints for the book. Peppered with grainy, blurred, and shot-from-the-hip images, Americans would provide an anti-aesthetic model for photographers of the 1960s, many of whom had become impatient with the formal prescriptive and narrative codes of both the fine art and documentary photography establishments. Frank's work signaled a decisive break from the high craft of taking and priming pictures as defined by photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and even Walker Evans, who was something of a mentor for Frank. When considering both his arduously disciplined working process and the final product, it is clear in retrospect that frank was always a consummate professional with a masterful eye. Like Evans, in his photographs of the Depression, frank also rejected the sentimentality that had characterized social documentary photography of the 1903s. Social documentary of this period largely, sought to invoke compassion and empathy in viewers in order to move them to address the social wrongs or inequities depicted by the images, But unlike Evans's famously neutral gaze, a number of Frank's photographs present a sardonic and even blistering assessment of his subject matter. Through its implicit refusal to suggest possible solutions to the social issues visualized by the camera, American differed from the documentary photography of both the Depression-era Farm Security Administration and the New York photo League. Frank's photographs pointed to more abstract social ills than Depression-era starvation and homelessness. implied alienation of a class of people in the face of postwar material abundance was a more slippery social (and representational) problem than the rural or urban poverty of the 1930s. Ultimately the work raised troubling questions only leave them unanswered. For example, contrast the piggish possessiveness exuded by Covered Car long beach, California (1956), with the forlorn, blanket-covered corpses in Car Accident U.S., between Winslow and Flagstaff Arizona (1956); then compare those two images with Frank's ecstatic vision of a light-streaked American highway that goes on forever in U.S. 235. New Mexico (1956). Frank turned a critical eye on American automotive culture, but he clearly loved the road. point of view represented in Americans is unequivocally that of the photographer-as-individual rather than as mediator between a social issue and the public. Unlike most Farm Security Administration photographers and photojournalists, Frank was not concerned with accommodating his images to the agendas of government agencies or magazine editors. financial and creative freedom made possible by the Guggenheim fellowship allowed Frank to blur the distinction between objective documentation and subjective art photography. Although American was to significantly affect subsequent photographic practice, it was neither widely reviewed nor well received upon its publication in the U.S. in 1959. In comparison to Edward Steichen's monumental exhibition The family of Man (1955), American was but a blip on the critical and commercial radar. At the time of its publication, The Americans was perceived to be an attack on not only the period's photographic standards, but also on its moral values and political beliefs. While Americans did receive positive reviews in the American press, the negative reviews have rightly come lo be understood as representative of the mainstream photography establishment's understanding of what photography should mean and how it should be practiced. …