It is often through the eyes of an outsider that we are most able to see ourselves clearly. The collection of iconic images that Swiss photographer Robert Frank captured on his 10,000-mile road trip across America amounts to nothing less than a historical document and a landmark in American culture.
Although it is barely a minute long, I wanted to bring you this very short video today because it introduces a seminal work in American photography that every photographer should be aware of.
Robert Frank’s The Americans is an inspiring collection of images captured during the years 1955 and 1956 in the course of the photographer's extended road trip across America. Capturing the lives of Americans from all strata of society, including those marginalized and living on its fringes, Frank’s work takes an unflinching look at the state of the American Dream in the 1950s.
On one hand, this collection of images is a historical document—a profound and deeply moving critique of American society in the mid-20th century, with all of its divisions and inequities. On the other hand, Frank’s work changed photography forever by shifting our perception of what comprises a worthy subject for photography, and what it is that gives a photograph its artistic quality.
Frank’s timing was also almost supernaturally prescient. The 1950s was the era of the Beat Generation, a literary subculture whose iconoclastic rejection of the status quo would eventually be the seeds of the hippie counterculture movement of the 1960s. Such was the cultural significance of The Americans that Jack Kerouac, one of the Beat Generation’s most prominent and visible artists, would pen the foreword to the book.
In this latest video from the YouTube channel of Tatiana Hopper, Tatiana offers a very brief introduction to Frank’s iconic collection of images. Watching this video is one minute very well spent for any photographer who had never previously encountered The Americans or was perhaps unaware of its cultural significance in the canon of American photography. My own copy of The Americans (which I used, by the way, to create the lead image for this article) is never far from my hands, and it is truly a book that you can go back to time and time again to enjoy its profound artistry and, of course, to draw inspiration for your own work.
