Robert Frank 'Trolley, New Orleans' 1955 from The Americans.
DISCUSSION PROMPTS:
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Few analysts have captured the sadness, tensions, ironies and possibilities of 1950s American culture and society with the depth and insight of Robert Frank. Frank's accomplishment is rendered all the more impressive since it was done without words in his volume of photographs, The Americans (1959) ... At first glance, Frank's The Americans might seem yet another document in the long tradition of foreign travelers' accounts of American society and culture. Frank arrived in New York from Switzerland in 1947, but over the next five years he traveled abroad often. Before beginning work on The Americans, Frank was a highly successful commercial photographer; his work appeared in Fortune, Life, Look, Harper's Bazaar and McCall's. Frank's auto-tour of 1955-1956 represented not only his break with previous photographic compositions but also his initial discovery of America. Frank did not record America passively; he approached it with cultural baggage, assumptions, a set of questions, a medley of expectations and definite, strongly formed visual preferences. Frank's personality, described by Joyce Johnson as a blend of "European dourness and pessimistic wit," certainly helped to focus his photographic vision ... If Frank was the Beat photographer in style, then as Jack Kerouac well understood, his images reflected and codified the Beat-Hipster ideal. In the under-punctuated, rambling stream-of-consciousness introduction to The Americans, Kerouac in his opening sentence places Frank's artistic vision squarely within the mainstream of the Beat:
"THAT CRAZY FEELING IN AMERICA when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in these tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film."
Kerouac's introduction did not ignore, in fact it celebrated, the pervasive sense of sadness evoked by Frank's photographs. Frank had, Kerouac observed, "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film." ... Out of a total of about sixty photographs depicting faces in The Americans, only a handful capture a smile or indicate any sense of happiness or adjustment ... Frank also proved to be an astute political observer of black life in America. He did not seek to mythologize blacks, to remove them from the complexity of history; he was careful to present their human dimensions and to provide visual clues to their historical situation. Rather than presenting a simplistic celebration of black existence, a call for primitivism, Frank was careful to document the ambivalence, irony and pathos of the black experience ... The cover photograph for the Aperture edition of The Americans (Fig. 6) perfectly captures realities of black life: we see faces of a number of people through the open windows of a New Orleans trolley. The pain and despair in the face of one black man immediately draw our attention. He is framed, as if in a prison, by the windows of the vehicle and is thus chained to the social realities of the segregation era. Likewise, he and the other black passenger pictured are exiled to the back of the trolley ... Critique and commentary, The Americans retains its distinguishing mark as a piece of literature that departs from the consumer oriented, standardizing trends of 1950s culture. The Americans presents the machine—the idol of the era—as livelier than its builders and consumers. The Americans also breaks from mainstream culture through its paradoxical interpretation of black America: oppressed blacks are emotionally freer than their white superiors. The volume must be read and understood as a significant commentary on American race relations in the 1950s.
an extract from George Cotkin's essay Robert Frank: The photographer in the Beat/Hipster Idiom
"THAT CRAZY FEELING IN AMERICA when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in these tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film."
Kerouac's introduction did not ignore, in fact it celebrated, the pervasive sense of sadness evoked by Frank's photographs. Frank had, Kerouac observed, "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film." ... Out of a total of about sixty photographs depicting faces in The Americans, only a handful capture a smile or indicate any sense of happiness or adjustment ... Frank also proved to be an astute political observer of black life in America. He did not seek to mythologize blacks, to remove them from the complexity of history; he was careful to present their human dimensions and to provide visual clues to their historical situation. Rather than presenting a simplistic celebration of black existence, a call for primitivism, Frank was careful to document the ambivalence, irony and pathos of the black experience ... The cover photograph for the Aperture edition of The Americans (Fig. 6) perfectly captures realities of black life: we see faces of a number of people through the open windows of a New Orleans trolley. The pain and despair in the face of one black man immediately draw our attention. He is framed, as if in a prison, by the windows of the vehicle and is thus chained to the social realities of the segregation era. Likewise, he and the other black passenger pictured are exiled to the back of the trolley ... Critique and commentary, The Americans retains its distinguishing mark as a piece of literature that departs from the consumer oriented, standardizing trends of 1950s culture. The Americans presents the machine—the idol of the era—as livelier than its builders and consumers. The Americans also breaks from mainstream culture through its paradoxical interpretation of black America: oppressed blacks are emotionally freer than their white superiors. The volume must be read and understood as a significant commentary on American race relations in the 1950s.
an extract from George Cotkin's essay Robert Frank: The photographer in the Beat/Hipster Idiom