A nation that is premised on an idea\u2014not on an alleged shared bloodline or eons of history on common acreage\u2014is prone to periodically question exactly who and what it is. The matter that binds Americans, as much as any doctrine or document, is the pursuit of a definition of who Americans are. There are facile adjectives applied to us\u2014optimistic, volatile, swaggering\u2014but they more often seem to apply to pretensions that we wear before the world. Who we are in our unguarded moments, and even what portion of people are included in the word we<\/em>, is another matter entirely. This is part of the reason that Robert Frank\u2019s photographic essay \u201cThe Americans<\/a>,\u201d published in France in 1958 and released in the U.S. a year later, is both an indelible reflection of American culture and one of the works that helped define it. To produce it, Frank, who died this week, at the age of ninety-four, spent two years scouring the country in a used car, courtesy of a Guggenheim grant, a contrail of dust his most constant companion.<\/p>\n Robert Frank with his newborn son in New York, in 1951.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span>Photograph by Elliott Erwitt \/ Magnum<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n Robert Frank, at age ninety-four, with his wife, June Leaf, at their home on Bleecker Street, in New York.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span>Photograph by Chester Higgins<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Frank was born in Switzerland, in 1924, to a Swiss mother and a German-Jewish father. His family remained safe throughout the Second World War, but he became part of the postwar exodus from Europe, departing in 1947 for New York, where he settled; later in life, he began dividing his time between Manhattan and Nova Scotia. His early magazine work, in Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/em>, gained him a reputation in New York arts circles, but it wasn\u2019t until 1955, when he undertook the work that became \u201cThe Americans,\u201d that his capacity as a photographer and a chronicler became widely apparent. Frank evolved as an artist, eventually turning to film and directing\u2014most notably \u201cCocksucker Blues,\u201d a cinematic record of the Rolling Stones\u2019 1972 U.S. tour, which became the subject of a protracted lawsuit. (The Stones attempted to suppress the film, partially out of fear over how its illicit contents would be received in the United States. On Tuesday, the band put out a statement<\/a> calling Frank \u201can incredible artist whose unique style broke the mould.\u201d) But \u201cThe Americans\u201d remained Frank\u2019s best-known work, a reference point for both him as an artist and the medium in which he created it.<\/p>\n \u201cButte, Montana,\u201d from \u201cThe Americans,\u201d 1956.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span>Photograph by \u00a9 Robert Frank \/ Courtesy Pace\/MacGill<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s often difficult to gauge the importance of a work long after its initial appearance, because the groundbreaking ideas of one generation tend to become the accepted conventions of those that follow it. \u201cThe Americans,\u201d however, was compelling as a contemporary document when it was released, and it remains so as an archival representation six decades later. The eighty-three photographs in the book were culled from more than twenty-seven thousand that Frank took in Nebraska, Montana, Connecticut, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, California, and various points in between. The original cover features a gracefully composed image of a trolley car in New Orleans, the passengers gazing directly out, as if deliberately holding eye contact with the viewer. It is a document of a mid-century American conveyance, but also a subtle testament to much more. The implications of the arrangement of those passengers\u2014the black travellers are seated in the back\u2014and the trolley\u2019s metaphorical depiction of an entire set of social relations are simply hinted at. Frank succinctly, subversively places all these people, who are literally heading in the same direction, under the title line of the book. They are the Americans.<\/p>\n \u201cPolitical Rally\u2014Chicago,\u201c from \u201cThe Americans,\u201d 1956.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span>Photograph by \u00a9 Robert Frank \/ Courtesy Pace\/MacGill<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The array of moments that Frank captured and presented is a statement on the broad, unwieldy idea of America itself: a lone Jehovah\u2019s Witness standing in Los Angeles, his face weathered and intense; a Miami dowager mid-conversation, a stole draped casually about her shoulders; a woman and child in a packed car in Butte, Montana, both so weary and concerned that they seem like real-life Joads, heading off in pursuit of better fortune. The American flag appears randomly in the series, affixed to a building during a parade in Hoboken, New Jersey; at a Fourth of July celebration in Jay, New York; in a bar in Detroit. A man in Venice, California, fashions one into a canopy, to shelter himself from the sun. The motif points to the varied undertakings here, the staggering diversity of lives coexisting in forty-eight contiguous states.<\/p>\n \u201cTrolley\u2014New Orleans,\u201d from \u201cThe Americans,\u201d 1955.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span>Photograph by \u00a9 Robert Frank \/ Courtesy Pace\/MacGill<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When Frank was working, photography had already been integrated into the media, but its universal acceptance as art, hastened by John Szarkowski\u2019s tenure as the director of photography at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art, was still years away. Americans might see images from other parts of the country in newspapers, and projects such as the New Deal\u2019s Works Progress Administration had created an archive of invaluable documentary photography, but the idea of essentially introducing America to itself through images, as Frank endeavored to do, was still an ambitious use of the craft. He was also working before the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 had transformed the road trip into an American rite. When Jack Kerouac\u2019s \u201cOn the Road<\/a>\u201d appeared, a year before \u201cThe Americans,\u201d the idea of driving across the country still carried a frisson of audacity and adventure. Fittingly, Kerouac wrote the introduction to Frank\u2019s book, in which he noted that Frank had \u201csucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.\u201d Even decades later, that is a remarkable assessment of what Frank achieved, even if those words don\u2019t resonate the way they might\u2019ve in 1958.<\/p>\n \u201cSan Francisco,\u201d from \u201cThe Americans,\u201d 1956.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span>Photograph by \u00a9 Robert Frank \/ Courtesy Pace\/MacGill<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Earlier this year, I visited the Pier 24 Photography gallery, in San Francisco, to see an exhibit called \u201cThis Land,\u201d a portrait of the United States as witnessed by eighteen photographers. It\u2019s a project that clearly finds Frank\u2019s work in its genealogy. The collection included Alessandra Sanguinetti\u2019s compelling images of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, and Richard Misrach\u2019s stark, beautiful photographs of the California desert. But it also included evidence of American decline: Brian Ulrich\u2019s images of defunct shopping malls, Dawoud Bey\u2019s picture of the shuttered Lenox Lounge, in Harlem, portraits of random Americans from Bruce Gilden\u2019s \u201cCitizen\u201d series, each of their faces portending, like a bad-weather forecast. If Frank captured the visages of people who look as if they just punched out from a double shift, Gilden\u2019s subjects look as if the plant had shut down three years prior and nothing has opened in its place. Declension is a conspicuous theme in \u201cThis Land\u201d in a way that is absent from \u201cThe Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBelle Isle\u2014Detroit,\u201d from \u201cThe Americans,\u201d 1955.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span>Photograph by \u00a9 Robert Frank \/ Courtesy Pace\/MacGill<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It is a strange and ironic form of achievement to craft outstanding work at age thirty-four and live to see that work define you as an artist for the next sixty years. Yet Frank\u2019s book, and thereby his statement about the country, still warrants consideration, albeit for reasons that are very different than when it initially appeared. We know how many of the themes that Frank touched on in the book have played out, yet we\u2019re no closer to answering many questions they raised about American identity, and are perhaps more belligerently confused by them now even than we were in 1958. Kerouac saw sadness in Frank\u2019s collection, but what is most notable about the staid, unburnished faces now is their comparative sanguinity. The passage of time does to emotion the same thing that inflation does to prices; yesterday\u2019s extravagance seems a steal today. And sadness, like exorbitance, depends entirely upon what it\u2019s being compared to.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ww-vb.mine.nu\/w108\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/cobb-frank-portrait2.jpg\" "\\"\\"\/")
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