The AmericansBy ROBERT FRANK

Reviewed by Michael Anderson

Half a century later, the photographer’s images still contain unsettling power.

 The combination of subject and style seems a visual summary of the decade: The Lonely Crowd meets On the Road.  

In 1955, a 31-year-old Swiss émigré photographer named Robert Frank loaded his wife and two children into a rattletrap automobile and set out to discover America. Financed by a Guggenheim fellowship, over two years Frank took more than 28,000 shots, which he gradually winnowed to the 83 images he arranged in The Americans, his groundbreaking book of photographs.

"Robert Frank established a new iconography for contemporary America," said John Szarkowski, the influential curator at the Museum of Modern Art;
"bits of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces." In his attempt to replicate Walker Evans’s celebrated documentation of the Great Depression, Frank abandoned the sharp focus, even framing and careful lighting characteristic of postwar photography, a style Frank had mastered in his work for clients such as Vogue, Fortune, Life, and Harper’s Bazaar.

For his haunting representations of empty highways, desolate houses, and alienated individuals, Frank created a moody chiaroscuro: shadowed lighting, unusual angles, abrupt cropping, grainy texture, and deliberately blurred focus. The combination of subject and style seems a visual summary of the decade: The Lonely Crowd meets On the Road. (Indeed, Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to the book.)