The Originality of Robert Frank S The Americans

¶ … Robert Frank is now recognized as one of the most important and influential American photographers of the twentieth century, but this recognition was hardly immediate. Frank's most important work, the compilation from 1958 entitled The Americans, could not find an American publisher initially and debuted in France. Published in America a year later, it was received with hostility: a review in Popular Photography would describe the photographs as "warped" and "wart-covered," declaring them "images of hate" (Dawidoff 2015). Other negative reviews described the book as "a slashing and bitter attack on some U.S. institutions," "a degradation of a nation," and "a sad poem for sick people" (Lane 2009). The immensely negative initial reception is even stranger when Frank in 2015 can be referred to in the New York Times as "the world's pre-eminent living photographer" (Dawidoff 2015). It is worth inquiring more closely what Frank's artistic achievement was in The Americans, and why it should have provoked such a strongly negative reaction initially.

Perhaps the simplest clue to the poor reception of The Americans in the late 1950s can be seen through Frank's own artistic genealogy. Frank was a protege of the legendary American photographer Walker Evans, and The Americans was funded by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation that Frank had received primarily because of Evans' patronage. Evans' own work represented the accepted artistic standard of American photography: carefully framed, composed, focused images, such as those from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his best-known work, a travelogue recording rural poverty in the South during the Great Depression. The Americans follows the travelogue format of Evans' masterpiece, but the photographic style is wholly different. In some sense, Evans felt the need to humanize and elevate his impoverished subjects: the camera lent them a grandeur and a dignity that poverty might be thought to deny them, and there was a sort of leftist political purpose behind his carefully composed and clear photographs. Frank, by contrast, aims for immediacy and reality, often to the detriment of these "classical" elements of photographic composition. Frank's photography is the sort that can be called "gritty" or "raw" in a praiseworthy way -- but in the late 1950s, grit and rawness were not considered praiseworthy elements of a photograph. Instead they merely seemed amateurish.

We can see both the merit and the lasting influence of Frank's methods, however, in a photograph like "Elevator -- Miami Beach, 1955." Here, a young woman, slightly off-center to the right, is working as an elevator-operator, standing by a panel of lighted elevator buttons, and looking somewhat mournfully up. To her left, a woman is exiting the elevator, and to her right a stout bespectacled man is still waiting to reach his floor. But only the girl is in focus. The other two figures are seen in blurry motion and silhouette, but the elevator-operator herself in a drab and baggy uniform is seen clearly. The text written for The Americans by Jack Kerouac summarizes the photo as "that little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons" (quoted in Lane 2009) There is obviously nothing posed about the photo, yet the "rawness" underscores perfectly so much of the underlying meaning of the photo: in an elevator, the employee who runs it is always in the same place, while numerous other people are in motion -- and paradoxically, in an elevator, the employee who operates it is likely to received the least attention from the passengers. The photograph's deliberate "badness" as compared to the careful framed composition of Walker Evans is what contemporary critics disliked about it, but this "badness" actually a different sort of goodness. Evans uses his own humanity to elevate his subjects, but Frank is using photography to hint at the actual subjectivity of the subjects. The elevator girl is not being elevated -- instead, the photograph is managing to see the world in a way that we can imagine she herself sees it. And Frank's method manages to avoid the hint of condescension that exists in Evans.