Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans. At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, NYC.

When I entered college in the fall of 1957 I was aware that there was a mainstream American culture and various counter cultures. In those days one of the most publicized of the latter was the beatniks, The Beat Generation. On the campus, aware of some badly dressed, look alike, and obviously antiestablishment persons in the university art department I quickly learned that everyone more or less conforms to the prevailing norm of his chosen social group: we are each of us conformist in his own way. As I have always been a supporter of individuality and individuation, the on campus “beats” did not elicit my interest or inspire my adulation.

By the fall of 1959 I had moved to New York City and if I was at all aware of the publication of Robert Frank’s The Americans at that time, I likely considered it but another tome in the beatnik canon. That suspicion would have been confirmed over the next few years when I became more aware of Grove Press, the American publisher of the book, and its publication, The Evergreen Review …some of these photographs were used as the magazine’s cover illustrations.

This is not to say that as a young New Yorker I was an uptown snob: I lived my years in New York almost exclusively in the West Village and at one time my ex wife was Barney Rosset’s secretary. While I might always have been counted upon to know “what was happening”, I was rarely a “player” in the prevailing trends.

Over the last fifty years I have likely had an exposure to many of these photographs in different venues, but it was not until I began to give more concentrated attention to photography in the last several years that the name and the work began to embed itself in my memory, most recently in the exhibition Made in Chicago, (see December, 2008, this blog.). Some of them have become familiar but they have not favorably impressed me. I have always felt that they were made as illustrations for Kerouac’s On the Road. (I like the book.).

When I read that the National Gallery was to present this Fiftieth Anniversary exhibition I decided that I would go down to Washington to see it. I was primarily interested in the process that went into the making of the book. At the National Gallery there was a second exhibition on the art of making the photography book. As an independent entity the book of photographs is one to which I have given little if any thought. The world is so full of them …it seems to me that the only thing more common than published photographs are published books of photographs …that I have never considered that there was ever very much creativity in their making, or that they were an art form separate unto themselves. But alas the weather last winter was colder than I wanted to experience and so instead of going to Washington I ordered the catalogue, Looking In.


At an estate auction several years ago I bought a box of photographs, family snapshots for the most part, thinking that I might someday make use of them somehow in a series of art works. Included in that box was an album of about 200+ photographs of one family, a man and a woman, their parents, their aunts and uncles, their brothers and sisters, their children, their dogs and cats, and their houses and automobiles. In a burst of housecleaning I decided to get rid of it as I had done nothing with the photographs for years.

My copy of Looking In arrived just as I had changed my mind and had decided to make a series of collages using some of the auction snapshots. During that process, going through the album looking for suitable material for the project, I became aware that in every one of those pictures each person, dog and cat, was smiling broadly. These were the happiest people I had ever encountered. They personified the attainment of the working class American dream. The photographs were dated from 1940 to 1960, that period in American history that is often looked back on as the best years of our lives, ignoring that the 50’s lead to the protests of the 1960’s.

The dichotomy between those seen in the snapshots and those seen in the Robert Frank book was remarkable. I could hardly reconcile the evidence that all of these persons resided in the same country.

One of the first differences to be noticed is that in the snapshots all of the subjects are known to the photographer, they are looking into the lens and complicit in their understanding of the photographic genre in which they are participating. As successful members of an upwardly mobile society, each person gives the photographer his best side. By contrast, in the Robert Frank photographs many of the subjects are unaware of being photographed or, when they are aware, they look at someone they do not know who is holding a camera. When they are knowingly photographed they are allowing him to photograph only their social persona: they wear the mask of the withdrawn, the benign, the indifferent.

In the commentary Frank states that he has captured the essence of his subjects. Yousef Karsh has made a very similar statement about his work. I disagree that any photographer can do that. The human personality is so richly layered and complex I believe no one photograph can catch the essence of any one person. It might catch a moment of unguarded spontaneity or emotional honesty, but a moment is the not the whole of the experience. I will add to this Karl Jasper’s comment that a person cannot be known: each of us is an experience in the process of becoming: at our demise all that is left are the subjective memories others have of us.

Reading the catalogue text and looking at the photographs I continued to be unimpressed with these pictures. They seemed to me nothing more than one would have anticipated from a work issued from a source that claimed a specific subcultural identity. But I was made aware that rather than just an American view there was a stronger European antecedent. It seemed to me that Robert Frank had come to America, he is Swiss, and traveled it widely and made photographs that illustrated his European background. And in fact he makes the claim that his photographs represent his felt response to what he saw, his subjective world view. That this was filtered through the background of his education called to mind Williams James’s statement: “A man’s philosophy tells me nothing about the world but everything about the man.”

The exhibition and the catalogue that contains all of the same material are quite good in illustrating the work that went into the making of the book. Of the 1000 frames that were made, using a Leica and 36 exposure rolls of 35mm film, Frank winnowed them down to 83 photographs. We see the contact sheets and we see 8 by 10 prints pinned to the wall just as he had done to study the photographs and to work out the organization. We also see some of his earlier work.

The most commanding aspect of the exhibition, however, is the display of the 83 works in the sequence he finally determined for the layout of the book. Seen as a contiguous exhibition the photographs are suddenly far better and far more interesting than they are in the book. One reason for this is the size of the photographs. I am a firm believer that a photograph has a correct size. Here they range from 8 by 10’s to 11 by 14’s and even larger, 16 by 20. In the book, the Grove Press edition, they are almost all the same size, the book being about 8 by 10 inches with a horizontal format. In the catalogue they are slightly larger. As might be expected from 35mm negatives, many of them are grainy, often dark, and many with soft focus. Rather than a fault, for Frank and his mentors, this was a characteristic of their style.

But the difference also has to do with the physical layout. Here the photographs are side by side in four small galleries whereas in the book they are one per page with the next behind the first or in the same page position, i.e.: on pages one, three and five. While there is a vague sense of continuity in the book, in the exhibition the works have both continuity and a dynamic relationship. But most important, in this layout, each of the photographs stands out more successfully as an individual photograph.

The first section is a good illustration of this.

The book is in four sections, each section beginning with a photograph containing an American flag. In the first section, the first photograph in the book shows us two women standing and looking out the windows of their tenement apartments. A wind blown flag covers their faces. They face front. They are in shadow, they are isolated from the event they watch, they are passive, impotent. The next photograph, on page two, shows us five top hatted men in profile facing our left. Picture three, on page three, shows us a man on an architectural ledge with his arms outstretched in a grand gesture. In picture four, on page four, we see a group of well dressed black men leaning against cars. They face to our left. The caption reads: Funeral, St Helena, S.C. Photograph number five on page five shows us a cowboy with two young women. They face right. And in picture six, on page seven, we see a military man, likely a career man, who is overweight and paunchy, crossing a street toward the camera accompanied by a woman who is clearly working class but made up and dressed in the haute mode of her social set. It is unclear if she is his wife or a prostitute: both seem possible.

As seen in the book none of these photographs seem to have any relationship to one another. But if we have leafed through the catalogue before beginning to study it more closely, as one is wont to do, we recognize that the man with the outstretched hands is in almost the same pose as an earlier 1951 photograph in which we see a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade Superman hot air balloon. Are we to infer that the man on the ledge is also full of hot air? If so, should we read him as “The Politician”? I think that’s a leap most mainstream folks are not likely to make, but one that most counter cultural folks would make readily. So if the interpretation is correct, the photograph preaches to the converted.

Further along in The Americans we see the same group of black men in another photograph of the same funeral. It is rather perplexing why we see them in this early page. The cowboy with the two women is very like another cowboy we see later standing on a New York City street. The couple crossing the street face, in the book, a blank white page. I think one would have to be a die hard puzzle fan to extract any sense of relationship out of these six photographs.

However, hanging on the wall next to one another, these read completely differently. Now the man in the center with outstretched arms can be seen as the locus for the others, he is the politician. The men on page two, looking, we suppose, at the crowd, are the committee men, the two women at the window are the constituency, the blacks, on the other side, are a separate constituency, the cowboy, with other fish to fry, looks to his business, he is at a rodeo, and the middle aged man and woman ignore the whole thing and are going out on the town or shopping. Seen all at once, it is a sociological/political overview of society. And seen all at once with a coherent narrative, each of the photographs assumes a greater depth. And once comprehended, they continue to maintain that more informed understanding.

For the most part the rest of the book repeats these contrasts, rich and poor, black and white, and at times gives us a series of parallels…the different social castes each separately at lunch, man and his automobile, etc. Thus the statement of the first section is reiterated and elaborated, but never more deeply explored. With its variations on a single theme, the work is one long sustained chord. The choice of 83 photographs was more than enough.

Just as no one photograph can capture the essence of the individual person, neither can a collection of photographs capture the essence of a geographically large society. There is too much in America that is left out of this essay. In the end this is a very one sided view, a very narrow interpretation. But it is not without validity: that which is documented …the social divisions between rich and poor, black and white, the street corner evangelicals, the shallow hedonism of materialism… continues, after 40 years of Republican misgovernance and voodoo economics, to be the prevailing mainstream social norm: ours is a culture in stasis. No doubt many foresaw this; many have attempted to redirect the course of history. But the mainstream could not or would not see it or hear it and they allowed themselves to be sucked into the slough of despond.

As photographs the photographs are often quite good and they consistently work as a suite. But I could not single out any one of them that I think is a great photograph. I had seen Plate 58, Political Rally –Chicago, 1956, last winter in Chicago in the LaSalle Bank Collection. There it was an 8 by 10 print and while intriguing it made little sense. In the book it is but one among many. But seen in this exhibition in a larger print, 16 by 20, with the large bell of the Sousaphone exactly at eye level, the personality of the man behind it completely subsumed by the political process in which he participates, it has tremendous impact …but only because it relates to the other photographs. The same can be said for the last photograph, the artist’s wife and children half asleep in a car at the side of a deserted highway. It is a poignant visual experience but only because of its relationship to the work as a whole. While that might be a weakness in the individual entities, that they all work together as an ensemble is the strength of the whole.

By showing us the contact sheets we can see that the young photographer was a man with eyes who was not afraid to turn his camera on a stranger and make a record of his feelings about that person and his place in his society. That takes a kind of courage. We can see that he traveled many, many miles looking, seeing, and recording, that he knew what he was looking for and that he could use that subject to make a specific kind of photograph when it presented itself to him.

But there is a too strong sense that he was looking for something specific to photograph rather than photographing what he happened to find. And there is too strong evidence of the influence of Frank’s European mentors …copies of their photography books are included in the exhibition… as well as a too strong evidence of Walker Evans’ influence on the young Frank …there is often a sense of this being their collaborative effort. Taken all together these influences suggest that Frank had yet to develop a personal style, his own voice. From his earlier work we can see that he repeats himself …the dividing line down the middle of 34th Street in an earlier photograph is rendered here as the dividing line down a remote southwestern highway, which is a variation on a photograph by Berenice Abbott, a friend of Walker Evans’. Ezra Pound once commented that the young writer begins by imitating a writer he admires, and that few ever develop a personal voice beyond that. Perhaps Robert Frank sensed that and perhaps that explains why, after this was published, he turned from still photography to film.

It is stated that the book has had a strong influence on subsequent American photography. But I think it is probably not so much because it is the work of a particular photographer, Robert Frank, but rather that he married American subject matter with European style. At that same time a new generation of film makers was inspired by the post war European Cinema that was invading small movie theatres all over America. Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus reconfigured our cities and our dwellings. Hans Hoffman and William de Kooning were changing the face of American fine art painting. It was the American Century but the look was decidedly The New Europe. To me that infusion of European influence is like erecting a steel frame building in Chicago and giving it an Italian Renaissance or French Baroque façade: the overlay of a foreign style is applied ornamentation, not architecture.

The Catalogue.
“Looking In, Robert Frank’s The Americans” is excellent. The exhibition was conceived and created by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. (They have the Robert Frank archives.) Sarah Greenough, the curator of the photography collection and the exhibition, has written four essays giving us a biography of the artist, his early years, his process in creating the book, and an afterward. Her writing should be a model for all future writers on the arts: she has a good writer’s voice, she brings the artist alive as a person, and her writing is completely lacking in grad school linguistic mumbo jumbo. The quality of her work as represented here should help us understand why The National Gallery is considered one of the world’s finest museums.

American museums are teaching institutions and the marriage of the catalogue and exhibition for this presentation is everything museum work should be. My disagreement with it is the claim that this photo essay is a major twentieth century artwork. I disagree. With its strong association to a specific historic moment, its still apparent identification with the beat generation, I think it does not transcend the level of genre: there is some very good work here but it lacks individuality.

Even though I saw this at the Met in New York, The National Gallery web site has better on line information. See their link on the right, Exhibition Feature, for detailed information.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/frankinfo.shtm

The Met web site has several reproductions of the photographs.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={1FD57D4D-FE17-41FA-9025-E2667E36AD27}