A Critical Analysis of 'The Americans'

‘The Americans’ is a highly influential photo book which consists of eighty three photographs taken by Robert Frank during the 1950s. The book was first published in France in 1958 and in the United States a year later.

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Robert Frank was born in Switzerland in 1924 and immigrated to the United States in 1947 where he started working as a fashion photographer for ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ magazine in New York City. Although he worked as a fashion photographer, he was very passionate about street photography and during his early years in New York he tried to get his photographs published in LIFE magazine, but got rejected every time. In 1953 he finally got frustrated with the commercial photography landscape and wanted to work on a project of his own.

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During his stay in New York Frank had befriended a lot of heavyweights of the photography community like Walker Evans, Edward Steichen, and Alexey Brodovitch and through their support he applied for a Guggenheim fellowship, which he received in 1955 to make a book on America. After receiving the grant he travelled over 10,000 miles, shooting across 30 states in nine months, after which he returned to New York, spent a year developing his photos and finally published the book in 1958.

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‘The Americans’ as a body of work has succeeded in staying relevant even to this day because it was something completely new for the time it was published. It tried to break away from the set norms of photography in the 1950s. Till then, documentary photography was seen as a very objective medium, which was not influenced by the thoughts and emotions of the photographer. In a time, when photography was considered a universal language, understood by all, Frank wanted his images to be open-ended and sometimes tried to add a sense of ambiguity so that each and every viewer could construct their own meaning, like people do for paintings. He also tried to move out of the aesthetic of photography which was not received well in those days as critics said that Frank’s work was “flawed by meaningless blur, grains, muddy exposure, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.” But they failed to understand that it was intentional, because through his images he wanted to portray his emotional response to a situation, instead of an intellectual or analytical one. He did not bother much about technical mastery but instead emphasised on feelings and in doing so he challenged the photographic style that was prevalent at the time.

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The 1950s was a time when the mundane reality of everyday life had been hidden away and people tried to highlight the prosperity of a post-war era and the achievable ‘American Dream’ that everyone was after. Nobody wanted to confront the harsh reality that war had left them with, the increasing racial division, the generation gap which was slowly growing between the teens and the adults or the economic disparity between the rich and the poor. Robert Frank being an immigrant provided a pair of fresh eyes to see America as it was, without glamorising it. We can also see that none of the images have people posing or smiling at the camera. This is because Frank wanted to capture the natural expression of real people going about their daily lives. The images in the series capture a wide range of emotions from prosperity and poverty to hope and despair to happiness and sorrow to empathy and finally death, which we all face in our lifetime, thus making the images relatable to everyone.

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This series provided an outsider perspective which was impartial and did not hesitate to show the ugly side of American society, which included poverty, mass consumerism and racism. This quickly caught everybody’s attention because these things hadn’t been shown before. Some of the recurring themes in his work were racial division, patriotism and the gulf between the rich and the poor. For example, the New Orleans photo on the cover shows a trolley car with white riders in front while African Americans sit behind them. However, he has also shown people from different races working together in a factory in Detroit as well as an African American nurse holding a white baby in Charleston, South Carolina, which gives us a sense of hope for equality in the future. Frank also saw that the richer sections of society had not been photographed that much and wanted to do so, but he soon realised that while one can find the poor out in the open, the rich were always secluded, behind closed doors. So he started visiting theatres, balls and high end restaurants which the rich frequented. Patriotism also seems to be an important theme for Robert Frank as many photographs in the book shows the American flag in bars, apartment buildings, political rallies etc. This might hint towards the high levels of patriotic sentiment shared by people living in 1950s America, after they came out victorious in the Second World War.

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Robert Frank used a 35mm Leica and had shot 767 films full of photos in the nine months that he travelled across America. Among these photos, he selected eighty three images and grouped them according to context. A lot of attention had also been given to sequencing so that a viewer could experience the whole series as a single body of work. Frank had also said in an interview that he didn’t see any of his photos as individual images, but part of a larger collection. Coloured photography was already in practice during the 1950s but Frank intentionally chose ‘black & white’ because according to him it represented hope and despair, which he wanted to convey through his photographs. From a technical standpoint, Frank did not adhere to the rules of composition, framing, lighting and exposure but rather focused on the concept and the story that each image had to convey.

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Even though ‘The Americans’ is held as one of the most influential photo books today, it was not received well at the time it was published because of the gritty style that Frank had used. It also received considerable criticism for creating a haunting portrait of the United States of America. Many critics of the time said that the book was “a slashing and bitter attack on some U.S. institutions,” “a wart-covered picture of America,” and a “disturbing” portrayal of “the Ugly American”. Regardless of the criticism that the book received, it was a masterpiece because Robert Frank was able to capture the true essence of American society in the 1950s. His images featured people from different cultures including Jews, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans and Whites. He consciously tried to include people from different walks of life and from various age groups, which covered politicians, gamblers, bikers, cowboys, aristocrats, prostitutes, travellers, factory workers, children, teenagers and senior citizen. In my opinion, Frank’s representation of so many people living together and coexisting as one nation despite their evident differences is something worth celebrating.