Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ ... ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century."[Guardian, Nov 7 2014]
So what impact did this photobook actually have?
How did it come to have such an influence?
How did the book come to be created and published?
Why did Robert Frank hang up his Leica after the publication of The Americans ?
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Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019) was a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker, who became an American binational. After the publication of The Americans in 1959 Frank concentrated on film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.
In 1946 he created his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, before emigrating to the United States in 1947, where he secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar, under the direction of Alexey Brodovitch.
Brodovitch favoured on-location fashion photography as opposed to the studio shots normally used in other fashion publications. He urged his photographers to look for jarring juxtapositions in their images.
As well as a hugely influential art director, attracting the best talent of the time, Brodovitch was a gifted teacher whose oft-repeated demand was "astonish me".
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After two years Frank returned to Switzerland where Walter Laubli (1902–1991) the new editor of Camera magazine, published the work of the 25 year-old Frank alongside a substantial portfolio of pictures by Jakob Tuggener (1904 – 1988), who was a kind of role model for the younger artist. The magazine promoted the two as representatives of the 'new photography' of Switzerland.
Tuggener's 1943 book Fabrik: Ein Bildepos der Technik, a photographic essay on the relationship between man and industry, in its filmic sequencing and absence of text (like one of his own silent films), was an avant-garde breakthrough in Swiss photography. It takes its readers on a free-ranging tour through an industrial world, guided by Berti, the factory errand-girl. The images were drawn from Tuggener’s commercial work promoting contented, peaceful Swiss workers and the introduction of new, ‘clean’, technology of electronics and hydroelectric power.
The series of seventy-two photographs draws on the expressionist aesthetic of the silent movie to impart a sceptical view of the destructive potential of unbridled technological progress – at the time the Swiss military industry was producing weapons for World War II.
Fabrik was not a commercial success – the copies were sold at a loss and in part apparently even converted to pulp.
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Frank travelled in South America and Europe. In the UK he spent time mainly in London, and he spent three weeks with a miner's family in Wales.
He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru, and returned to the U.S. in 1950. That year was momentous for Frank, who, after meeting Edward Steichen, participated in the group show “51 American Photographers” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
After moving his family briefly to Paris, in 1953, he returned to New York and continued to work as a freelance photojournalist for magazines including McCall's, Vogue, and Fortune. Frank became friendly with Walker Evans, who had had a permanent role on Fortune from since 1945. The two collaborated on a few notable photo essays, including an essay on the beauty of hand tools.
In 1955 Edward Steichen included seven of his photographs (many more than most other contributors) in the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man.
Walker Evans encouraged Frank to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship and, in 1955, Frank secured the first Fellowship in photography awarded to a non-American. He used it to travel across the United States and photograph all strata of its society. His application was supported by recommendations from Walker Evans (who had himself received a fellowship), Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Liberman, Edward Steichen, and Meyer Schapiro.
In 1955-56, with the support of this fellowship, he traveled across the United States, his ambition “to produce an authentic contemporary document; the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation.”
Evans helped Frank plan his route and Frank returned to places Evans had photographed years before.
"The chilled dispassionate eye Evans had brought to eighty-seven subjects in American Photographs was not the brooding private, personal feeling one senses in the eighty-three photographs of The Americans."
[James R. Mellow: Walker Evans (1999), p. 553]
In 1955 Walker Evans commissioned Frank to produce a series of photographs for an article for Fortune on the Pennsylvania Rail Road's elegant afternoon train, 'The Congressional', which ran express from New York to Washington, D.C. Frank primarily trained his camera on businessmen and politicians drinking in the train's lounge and getting shoeshines. The project marks the start of the artist's two-year journey across the country on his Guggenheim fellowship.
The cities he visited included Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan; Savannah, Georgia; Miami Beach and St. Petersburg, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Reno, Nevada; Salt Lake City, Utah; Butte, Montana; and Chicago, Illinois.He took his family along with him for part of his series of road trips over the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 shots.
Just 83 of these were selected by him for publication in The Americans.
Frank's divergence from contemporary photographic standards presented a difficulty at first in securing an American publisher. Les Américains was first published in 1958 by Robert Delpire in Paris, as part of its Encyclopédie Essentielle series, with texts by Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck that Delpire positioned opposite Frank's photographs.
The Americans was finally published in 1959 in the United States, without the texts, by Grove Press, where it initially received substantial criticism. Popular Photography, for one, derided his images as "meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness." Though sales were also poor at first, the fact that the introduction was by the popular Kerouac helped it reach a larger audience.
Tod Papageorge: There were reasons, however – apart from Evans’ relationship to Frank, and even apart from the connections between their pictures – why [Evans’] American Photographs might have been remembered after Frank’s book was published. Both books were bound in black (Evans’ in bible cloth, the cover of hymnals), and were almost the same size – American Photographs a bit taller, The Americans slightly longer, to accommodate the different shapes of their pictures. Evans’ book contained eighty-seven photographs, Frank’s eighty-three. And, of course, the titles of the two books – as well as the block layout of their title pages – echoed one another. Even the spare design of The Americans, which was unusual at a time when most picture books were laid out like magazines, might have recalled American Photographs, since this design can be described almost exactly by quoting a critic’s reservation about the first edition of [Walker] Evans’ book: “The pictures are printed on the right-hand page, the left unsullied except for a page numeral. Though the treatment is in keeping with the book, the reader would probably prefer to have a few of the aids to easy enlightenment such as captions, and possible footnotes with the pictures.” But no one, apparently, noticed these resemblances.
In a statement written shortly before The Americans was published, Frank said: “It is important to see what is invisible to others. Perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness. Also it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph,”
Tod Papageorge's essay on the many affinities between Evans and Frank offers many useful insights... For example, he points out that "with a few exceptions, Frank ignored the use of dramatic gesture and motion."
The following six paragraphs — until the red book cover — are lifted from Papageorge’s essay, which is freely available on the internet.
"The characteristic gestures in his pictures are the slight, telling motions of the head and upper body: a glance (19, 37), a stare (15, 41), a hand brought to the face (35, 51, 53), an arched neck (17, 55), pursed lips (15, 31). They suggest that Frank, like Evans, believed significance in a photograph might be consonant with the repose of the things it described.
The effect of Frank’s pictures is inseparable from the direct, rapid voice that seems to inform them. Evans’ photographs, on the other hand, appear impersonal, and usually are presented as if they were just the inevitable result of a process in which someone (Evans) had found a subject (or let it find him), set up a camera (in noon light), framed the picture (centered it), and exposed his film (one sheet for each subject).
When Frank photographs three crosses commemorating a highway accident – a picture which, in the sequencing of The Americans, follows a photograph of a statue of St. Francis, and precedes one of an automobile assembly line – [above] the compression of sky, shadow, and landscape which occurs in the picture again describes a world marked by the adjacency of dreams and death.
In Frank’s transforming vision of America, a car is a casket , a trolley a prison, a flag a shroud. As for us, we stand in odd groups and stare at some imposingly sad event beyond the frame of Frank’s camera, while he captures us and the event itself is forgotten. All events, in fact – the rodeo, the Fourth of July picnic, Yom Kippur, the graduation, the charity ball, the highway death, the funeral – serve only as reasons to gather and for Frank to condense us into a symbol.
[Ev]en his last photographic project, a series of ten pictures taken in 1958 from the Fifth Avenue bus, resembles, in concept at least, a series of subway portraits started by Evans in 1938, presumably about the time that American Photographs was prepared and published.
The crucial, disconcerting fact about Frank’s career is that he rejected photography, a decision that, as we now see, cannot be explained by suggesting that Frank simply had said all that he could as a photographer and wanted to try something new. For if Frank did have nothing left to say, it seems fair to speculate that it was because he had exhausted the structure provided for him by Evans’ work.
Robert Frank: [After The Americans] I put my Leica in a cupboard. Enough of lying in wait, pursuing, sometimes catching the essence of black and white, the knowledge of where God is.
As he said in 1977, “a lot of my work deals with myself, especially my films. It’s very hard [for me] to get away from myself. It seems, almost, that’s all I have.”
By the time The Americans was published in the United States, Frank had already moved away from photography to concentrate on filmmaking.
The Rolling Stones invited Robert Frank to take photos for the cover of Exile on Main Street, which lead to the Stones hiring Frank to film a documentary of their 1972 American tour. The result was Cocksucker Blues, a film that manages to be shocking even by the standards of today.
Robert Frank teamed up with the artist June Leaf and moved to rural Vermont. There are some splendid videos of the two of them on YouTube. This partnership may have encouraged his "sentimentality" and focus on himself and his biography.
Though Frank continued to be interested in film and video, he returned to still images in the 1970s, publishing his second photographic book, The Lines of My Hand (1972), a "visual autobiography", consisting largely of personal photographs. However, he had largely given up "straight" photography, instead creating narratives out of constructed images and collages, incorporating words and multiple frames of images that were directly scratched and distorted on the negatives.
This webpage has been produced as part of a series of seminars I have presented on the theme of "documentary" for our U3A history of photography here in Leeds. This strand began by looking again at the work of ...
- Eugene Atget
- Berenice Abbott
- Walker Evans
- ... and here Robert Frank
The close personal links between these four great photographers should be clear from my presentations. In between we considered the very different "documentary" approaches of ...
- Sergio Larrain
- Lars Tunbjork and Hans Eijkelboom
- Eamonn Doyle and Trent Parke
Here I have posted links to some of the PowerPoint slideshows I have constructed. For each, there exists a recording of the Zoom sessions, the talk I delivered and our discussion. Let me know if you wish to have the links.
Since December 2016 our U3A history of photography seminar has covered more than 50 individual photographers. Contact me if you wish to check out our treatment of anyone in particular...
Among those we have discussed are... [underlined names indicate links to pages I have created for our discussions]...
Ansel Adams, André Kertész, Man Ray, Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Fay Godwin, David Goldblatt, Martin Parr, Mark Riboud, Germaine Krull, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Joel Meyerowitz, Annie Leibovitz, Eugene Atget, Garry Winogrand, Man Ray, Lee Miller, 'The Idea of North and Northern' Photographers, Sebastiao Salgado, Richard Avedon and other fashion photographers, Irving Penn, Robert Frank, Charles Howdill, Alexander Rodchenko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Elliott Erwitt, Vivian Maier, Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, John Davies, John Blakemore, Ralph Gibson, Daido Moriyama, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Magnum: David Seymour (Chim), George Rodger, Stephen Shore, Dora Maar, Bill Brandt, Gordon Parks, Tina Modotti, Imogen Cunningham (revisited), Saul Leiter & Fred Herzog, Simon Roberts, Don McCullin, David Bailey, Karl Blossfeldt, Robert Maplethorpe, W. Eugene Smith, August Sander, Carolyn Mendelsohn, Ansel Adams (revisited), W. Eugene Smith, Josef Koudelka, Josef Sudek, Sirkka-Lissa Konttinen, Chris Killip, Jeff Wall, Greg Crewdson, Phillip-Lorca-diCorcia, Helmut Newton, Hans van der Meer, Peter Dench, Margaret Bourke-White, Inge Morath, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Robert Adams, Henri Lartigue, Alfred Stieglitz, Pictorialism, Edward Steichen, Nadar, Daguerre, Fox Talbot, the invention of photography and the 19thC, Hill and Adamson, Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, The f/64 group and its philosophy, Alex Webb, Harry Gruyert, Berenice Abbott, Sergio Larrain, Lars Tunbjork, Hans Eijkelboom, Eamonn Doyle, Trent Park, Mark Power, Paul Reas, Paul Graham, Paul Strand, Robert Adams and 'A (Brief) History of Fashion Photography'
In addition I have written pages on
Credits:
Photos taken from the internet under fair use criteria and used here only for educational purposes.