Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2 January 2010)

Robert Frank’s “The Americans” is photography of a family man content not to seek beauty, which no longer must be conquered, and capable of pondering ugliness, amid which he does not have to live. It is instructive to see homely faces populate the 1950s. Most other images of that era come from Hollywood, where stars were bred carefully, and extras were aspiring starlets.

The faces of Frank’s subjects, aware of the photographer, reflect as much the photographer’s personality as the subjects’. Photography, like staring, intrudes. In the 1950s—when a typical photographer would have been a middle-aged moustached man with a camera that few could afford, not a teenage Asian girl with an indestructible cell phone—unsolicited photography must have been a greater affront than it is today.

Frank’s photographs do not reveal what is unique about each photographed subject. Perhaps nothing is, consistent with the travelogue’s message of uniform misery. Or perhaps individuality, whose elicitation is an art, has been intentionally omitted from Frank’s photojournalism in order to document what is common to Americans and to understate that which differentiates them.

Most disturbing in Robert Frank’s photographs is neither the poverty nor the estrangement of his subjects, but rather their apparent lack of purpose. Religious symbols do not engage. Funerals, marriages, and family life appear to be more influenced by the past experiences of others than by the freshness of one’s own experience.