- The book was originally published in France one year before being in the United States. The French version, Les Americains, contained writings by a number of famous authors, including John Steinbeck and William Faulkner. In Les Americains, the images served more to supplement the writing.
- When published in America in 1959, the photographic content remained the same, however the text was completely changed. Jack Kerouac, American poet and Beat writer, wrote the preface to the book and curt, descriptive titles replaced the writings.
- Kerouac describes the photographic series as if "[Frank] sucked a sad poem right of America onto film." This, I believe, is a fitting description of Frank's presentation of the "juke boxes and coffins, … cowboys, long empty roads, tract houses on lonely fields, flags and bikers, drive-in movies and barbers' chair" (Wells), as the series is meant to expose the ugly and vulnerable truths, hidden by the guise of the seemingly unobtainable American dream. To read the introduction, you can click here.
After carefully leafing through the images, I find myself
truly enamored with Frank's work. Though he documents classism, racism, and the
slew of injustices running rampant in American life of the time, each
photograph gives a truthful representation of our country's people and
landscape. Some photographs are harsh and poignantly sad, others show an
unassuming joy in the expressions of Frank's subjects. I think what Frank was
trying to do was expose flaws in the American dream without cutting it down,
taking the Americans off the pedestal. The
Americans shows people living in
both happiness and sadness in a system in need of repair.
If anyone is interested in looking at The Americans on their computer, you can
look at a pdf here or watch a video of someone flipping through the book here.
In writing this blog post, I largely use "Robert Frank: Published by Steidl" as a reference.
1 comment:
I am truly in love with how graphic and exposed these photos are. Often times, all we see are poignant, specifically chosen, clear black and white images of the "past". Now I am not questioning when these images were taken but I do question their ability to "represent" an entire time period. The "American Dream" which has been shoved down our throats since the 50's seldom sheds light on the adversity we faced, as a country, to get to where we are today. We obviously didn't all reach this dream. There's still poverty, adversity, crime, and prejudice. Robert Frank exploits this. Through imperfect photographs, blurry and unbalanced we can see the truth. We can see how unsupported most of our country was. They say "ignorance is bliss" but how ignorant could we be to think that every government program, law, and bill passed or presented really did anything? Frank had this amazing way of photographing hardships in such a beautiful way. Everything was touched with this sense of beauty that makes me, as a viewer, realize that as much hardship as these people faced, there was still a sense of life to be happy about.
-Morgan Kirol
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