Americans, Now and Then

Robert Frank
“Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
September 22 – January 3, 2009



If time has made any impact on The Americans since its initial release 50 years ago, it has been to reinforce the perceptive genius of Robert Frank. In and era when America was content to exist in a passive-aggressive state of denial about its racial issues and confused cultural identity, Frank’s camera found the moments that articulated both so completely that the images still resonate. Today, however, despite their often charged nature, they represent a nostalgic America: artifacts from another age, ripe for reevaluation.

The Met’s take on the iconic book, titled “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans,” is both reevaluation and extended cut. The show leads in with several images from Frank’s previous studies in South America, England and France, that cast light on his early development. In these rough prints, Frank is already learning to use selective focus to isolate a figure, create plunging angles to drive the scene, and crop so that the photograph feels like a moment in time. Another early highlight is his application for the Guggenheim fellowship that funded the production of The Americans and his massive, continental road trip. This document doesn’t do much to cast Frank as a great writer, but coupled with the letter of recommendation from Walker Evans and promises of a book deal, it’s clear that even then, getting a grant was more about politics than artistic practice.

But politics or no, what is more interesting now is the marvel of how Frank could have known, could have seen in those fleeting moments between sight and shutter release exactly how to make tension visually potent. Photographs like Trolly—New Orleans, 1955, of a segregated trolly car with white women and children taking priority seating over African Americans, still hang with a tangible feeling of revelation. Again, in Charleston, South Carolina, 1955, where a resigned African American nanny holds a white baby in her arms and looks away into the distance, the message is just as unassuming and intense as it was 50 years ago. The contact sheets with multiple variations of these iconic shots, and the wall of test prints point to how calculated Frank really was when it came to getting it just right. What he created was more than momentary perception, but meaning that builds and takes its time until realization breaks like a cold sweat. Frank knew that significance is something that can’t be forced; it only happens when you let it unfold.

So 50 years later the legacy of The Americans is not the work, but actually the man. Frank is present in this show in a way he never could have been with the original book: his process, his judgments, his intentions. In his later years, Frank grew frustrated with the eventual success of his creation and sought to subvert it by symbolically destroying it in a series of film performances, which play at the very end of the exhibition. In spite of him, his visual essay is stronger than ever, and with that strength, his vision of America becomes our history.