The Americans, by Robert Frank

The Americans, by Robert Frank

My thoughts on this influential collection of photography.

May 4, 2024

Tags: Book Reports, Photography

A few years ago, I stopped into the Leica Store on Bush Street between Union Square and Chinatown in San Francisco. I made my visit out of curiosity more than anything else. Although I could never justify spending the amount of money that Leica currently asks for their gear, I could still window shop.

One thing I didn’t expect to encounter there was a well-stocked collection of books for sale. One caught my eye in particular: The Americans by Robert Frank (1958). I had never seen the inside of it, but I knew its status as one of the most influential photography books of the twentieth century. If perhaps as a souvenir of my visit to the Leica Store more than anything else, I picked up a copy.

The Americans by Robert Frank

It was certainly one of the cheapest things I could have bought there. When I made my purchase, I had in the back of my mind one simple piece of advice from Eric Kim which I found in David Gibson’s Street Photographer’s Manual: “buy books, not gear.”

As any internet search will tell you, there’s already been a ton written about this book. Casually navigating to the Wikipedia articles on Robert Frank and on the book itself, I learned that Frank used the Guggenheim Fellowship he won to travel around and document the United States in 1955. Of the 28,000 photographs he took, he selected only 83 for publication in his book. Assuming 36 exposures per roll of film, that’s only one keeper image for every 9 rolls or so.

Remembering that little statistic comforts me. Sometimes I look at the work I’ve done over the course of one roll of film and shake my head with disappointment over all the stinkers I see. But looking at the contact sheets of celebrated photographers reminds me that I’m not the only one who burns through film with few if any images of value on them. Seeing those contact sheets pushes me to get out and get that one keeper photograph I’m proud to have taken.

Paging through The Americans, I wondered to myself what other photographs were on the same roll of film that contained a keeper image. My copy of Magnum Contact Sheets had already driven home the value of examining a photographer’s contact sheet. It’s fascinating to see the creative process as it unfolds—that is, how one arrived at a subject, worked it, and perhaps went on to something else. Contact sheets preserve that sequence of events. We lost that record of continuity when we transitioned from film to digital photography.

I didn’t have to wonder about those contact sheets for long. It turns out that many of them are available on the National Gallery of Art’s wonderful online profile of The Americans.

Contact Sheet 36
U.S. 285, New Mexico, 1955
Contact sheet, 1990.28.2158 (left). U.S. 285, New Mexico, 1955, 1990.28.328 (right). The Robert Frank Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, contact sheet 36 sequence accessed via nga.gov
Contact Sheet 58
Political rally, Chicago, 1956
Contact sheet, 1990.28.2179 (left). Political rally, Chicago, 1956, 1996.147.1 (right). The Robert Frank Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, contact sheet 58 sequence accessed via nga.gov
Contact Sheet 61
Los Angeles, c. 1955/1956
Contact sheet, 1990.28.2182 (left). Los Angeles, c. 1955/1956, 1990.28.340 (right). The Robert Frank Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, contact sheet 61 sequence accessed via nga.gov

When it first appeared, The Americans drew a poor reception from many critics. In the May 1960 issue of Popular Photography, for instance, several of the magazine’s editors weighed in.

Les Barry sniffed that Frank’s photographs are “faithful to the school of candid grab-shotism.” Although he later admitted in the very same sentence that Frank has “a sharp eye and a steady shutter finger,” Barry continued to write that his “shots disclose a warped objectivity that gives this book its major limitation.”

John Durniak wrote that, although Frank “is a great photographer of single pictures,” he is a “poor essayist and no convincing story-teller at all.”

Arthur Goldsmith acknowledged Frank’s expression of “an intense personal vision.” But he then brushed off “the nature of that vision” with a sweep of hand that has been quoted in countless secondary accounts of how many observers reacted to The Americans: “I found its purity too often marred by spite, bitterness, and narrow prejudices just as so many of the prints are flawed by meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposure, drunken horizon, and general sloppiness.”

And as far as Jack Kerouac’s introduction to the book was concerned, Goldsmith was “just as glad he didn’t, as he promised he could, write 30,000 words about the pictures.”

Review of The Americans in Popular Photography (May 1960)
An assessment of Robert Frank’s The Americans appeared on pp. 104-106 in the May 1960 issue of Popular Photography. Via archive.org

I relate with Arthur Goldsmith’s comments on Kerouac’s introduction. After reading a page or two, I rolled my eyes, skipped it, and just went for the photographs themselves. I didn’t need Kerouac to explain how I should see them.

Some of Frank’s photographs are rather unkind. I’m thinking of a particular one in which Frank depicts a couple trying to enjoy what appears to be a nice day in a San Francisco park. Reclining on the grass, they look back with an expression that leaves no doubt about their disgust over the intrusion.

One morning years ago, I was standing at a bus stop on my way to work. Some jerk came at me from nowhere, shoved a camera into my face, and grinned as he took a picture. The experience of being on that end of a camera lens in that way probably influenced my own photography as much as any other source of positive inspiration I’ve encountered. There is candidness, and then there is meanness. The former has artistic value, but the latter gives all photographers a bad name.

But those types of images aside—and what is a provocative book without them?—Robert Frank’s The Americans did prompt me to return to my own black and white photography and edit a collection of images that best depict my own taste in candidness. Even in an indirect sense, Frank’s work has likely affected my own. After all, many photographers with whom I identify as being influential were themselves no doubt influenced by Robert Frank’s photography.

Ultimately, the images in The Americans have proven to have lasting historical value. His technique may have appeared crude to the sensibilities of the 1950s and 60s, but what was crude then is gritty and real now.

Although all 83 images in Robert Frank’s The Americans are available for viewing on archive.org, this is definitely one instance where experiencing the images as they appear in a physical book is far superior to the online viewing experience. Especially if you count yourself as being a street or documentary photographer but don’t already have a copy of this book on your bookshelf, I highly recommend putting one there.

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