Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ was the book that changed the way I looked at photography and i’m envious of anyone picking it up for the first time. The beautifully sequenced, haunting photographs in ‘The Americans’  break all technical rules of photography in favour of a spontaneous, coarsely poetic beauty that I never seem to tire of. Not bad for a book that’s over 50 years old.

‘The Americans’ was created during a Guggenheim funded road trip across America in 1956 and 1957 in which the Swiss born Frank (sometimes accompanied by his young family) set out to to document “how Americans live, have fun, eat, drive cars, work and dream”. Frank shot from the hip and worked intuitively often snatching shots surreptitiously with his hand-held 35mm Leica, using his unique outsider perspective to expose themes of power, racism, inequality, and alienation. By the end of his 10,000 mile journey (in which he himself experienced prejudice after being arrested under suspicion of being a communist spy) he had made more than 27,000 photographs and had ‘sucked a sad poem out of America onto film’ as Jack Kerouac writes in the breathless introduction that accompanies the book.

Frank selected and carefully sequenced 83 surprising, beautiful and disturbing photographs for the final book, often blurred, dark, taken on-the-run or out of focus and always revealing.  For example the Hollywood picture where the starlet is blurred, with an in focus nail-chewing fan behind her, an image that turns around the cliché of stargazing and, by doing so, comments on our obsession with celebrity. Or the nameless lift attendant girl, alone with her thoughts as a blur of ghost like shadows of glamorous diners glide past her. Then there’s Frank’s remarkable snap of a New Orleans trolley car, its passengers’ positions in the windows and expressions fortuitously echoing the social hierarchy.

Frank’s unflinching photographs suggested an alternate America more akin to Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ than to the 1950′s conceits of of Pat Boone, Grey Flannel Suits and the perfect Martini and was unsurprisingly received with general distain upon it’s first publication.  By the time the brilliance of The Americans was acknowledged, Frank, ever the outsider, had moved on to film-making. ‘The Americans’ is now recognised as a Landmark of 20th Century photography with scholarly essays written about just about every photograph and the original contact prints selling for over $20,000 at Christies. My advice is too resist the urge to Google for explanations to the photographs, simply pick up the book in reception and let Kerouac’s words roll around in your head while you absorb the stunning images that accompany the text.

Tags: 20th Century Photography, Allen Ginsberg, Art, Art Direction, book design, Creativity, Design, Guggenheim, Jack Kerouac, Leica, On The Road, Photo book, Photography, Photography Book, Road Trip, Robert Frank, The Americans

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