Along with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Robert Frank’s The Americans is one of the great milestones of Beat Generation creative work. It’s a series of 83 photographs that Frank — a Swiss-born Jewish émigré to New York City — took during road trips across a disillusioning mid-1950s America adrift in Cold War anxiety, ennui and loneliness. These were not staged, prettified or conventional images — they were tell it (and see it) like it is.
Its most famous image, “Trolley—New Orleans,” captures all you need to know about the gap between the real America of the time and the illusion by looking through the trolley windows at unsmiling passengers, with African-Americans seated in the rear. It’s become a defining image of our country’s shortcomings.
Frank’s The Americans has proven so influential that you have to wonder how it did so. First published in France in 1958 and the U.S. in 1959 (with a foreword by Kerouac), it initially met a mixed reception. Some found both Frank’s unconventional photographic approach and his greater vision too stark. Only slowly has it found its audience, especially as the Beats begat the counterculture of the 1960s.
That slow, dramatic journey of the book is one of the things that interested RJ Smith, author of the new and thoughtful biography American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank and a former senior editor at Cincinnati Magazine. He will present his book at a 6 p.m. presentation Thursday (Dec. 14) at downtown’s Mercantile Library.
“One thing I wanted to understand better was the arc of (The Americans’) life,” Smith says. “How it was received at its time, and how over the many years since it has been picked up by different generations and viewed quite differently. It’s to a point where today it seems like this Mount Rushmore kind of text that many artists feel they have to define themselves against, somehow.”
Now 93 and still a cultural force, Frank has not yet made another still-photography project as culturally impactful as The Americans. His best-known work, a film, has never been officially released: Cocksucker Blues, about the Rolling Stones’ 1972 Exile on Main St. American tour, upset the band by showing too much sex and drugs with their Rock & Roll. His tussles with the band received a lot of coverage in the music press at the time. (The group had first used Frank’s work on the Exile album cover.)
Smith remembers reading about Frank’s conflicts with the Stones during that period. “This kind of infinitely cool guy had gone his own way and now the Stones were really mad at him,” he says. “He was this interesting person nobody outside of New York knew a whole lot about.”
As he researched Frank’s history (the photographer did not cooperate on the project), Smith discovered some origins, some roots, for the artistic vision that propelled The Americans.
“He had an amazing eye and amazing self-confidence,” Smith says. “He studied graphic design and photojournalism in Zurich in the 1930s and early 1940s, when so much was going on visually at the newsstands and on posters. And coming to New York, he was absorbing ideas frequently.”
As a magazine photographer, Frank began to see the rest of the U.S. “He saw this as amazing material to make something out of, even though he had no idea what that would be,” Smith says. “He goes into (The Americans) looking at the culture and world that amazes him, and trying to figure it out.”
At some point, Smith says, Frank realized the America he was finding needed more of a “pushback” than he originally conceived. That may have come about after suspicious Arkansas police arrested him, a foreign-born outsider.
The Americans also has a strong sense of melancholy. Smith believes that, to some extent, Frank brought that with him on his travels. “But the other side of it is he saw (melancholy) out there,” Smith says. “He saw things that we, by and large, accept as truths today about what this county can do to people without a lot of power or money, or who are isolated geographically. He saw that and showed us that was a big part of who we are.”
RJ Smith discusses American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank 6 p.m. Thursday (Dec. 14) at the Mercantile Library, 414 Walnut St., Downtown. The presentation is free, but reservations are required at reservations@mercantilelibrary.com.
This article appears in Dec 6-13, 2017.