The Americans
by Jack Kerouac, Robert Frank
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Book Reviews of The Americans
Book Review: Just a Suggestion:
Summary: 5 Stars
If you want to understand the USA of today, 2009, there's no better time and place to start than with America in the mid 1950s, when the "post-war-cold-war-post-cold-war" culture first took shape, at the threshold of: rock and roll and youth culture; clvil rights, the end of Jim Crow, 'crossover' culture; global immigration, the culture of diversity; college as a normal expectation for lower-middle class kids; the Beat Generation, Hippies, the turn-on-drop-out culture; two kids, two income families, two cars in every garage, and above all a TV in every home. You'd have been quite a prophet if you'd foreseen 'what we are today' on the basis of 'what we were in 1950,' but the seeds were there.
If you want to 'see' the 1950s, you can do it. You don't need a time-machine. The 85 photographs in this famous collection, taken 'on the road' by the German-Swiss Robert Frank, are worth at least 85,000 words. All in black-and-white, eclectic and experimental in darkroom technology, almost none of them of 'famous' people or familiar sights, these carefully and thoughtfully sequenced photographs reveal more of the shadows upon the American Dream than the sparkling spot lights, but they are as uncompromisingly honest as a dental X-ray. Not a speck of caries can be hidden. Frank saw through the superficial smiles of the 1950s to the cavities of core city and rural poverty, racism, sexism, crassness, and forced conformity - the grotesque 1950s that Flannery O'Connor depicted in Wise Blood and other works, that James Dean and Marlon Brando portrayed in films, and that Jack Kerouac tried to flee by taking to "the road."
If you want to understand Kerouac - or the appeal of Kerouac to a generation of young Americans - you couldn't do better than spend some hours looking at these photos of the culture he fled from. And in fact, Kerouac himself played a role in getting Frank's work recognized and published. The introduction to the first edition of The Americans is possibly Kerouac's most intelligent and coherent piece of social analysis, almost a manifesto of dissatisfaction with the stifling mediocrity of his contemporary USA.
Robert Frank was above all a photographer. A camera artist. The compositional and technical innovations that he achieved in this and other thematic collections of photos nudged the aesthetic of photography in directions that are still evident even in commercials during football games or in fashion shots for auto ads. The huge touring exhibit of his work, now on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has reminded me of his powerful impact both as a visual artist and as a social commentator. Don't miss it if you have a chance!
Book Review: The definitive "The Americans"
Summary: 5 Stars
We're lucky to have this edition. Robert Frank is an old man with health issues now. That he is healthy enough to oversee this work is wonderful. Everything about this edition - especially in comparison to the 2007 Delpine edition I purchased earlier this year - is first-rate. I wish I had known this was coming out!
The book is a little smaller than the Delpine, but that's the only real negative (if it is one) I can think of. The main thing to me is that the photos themselves are how Frank intended them to look. Gone are the overly-lightened faces that plague the Delpine book. This is a pet peeve of mine that kills many photos in this Photoshop age. This is very obvious in the New Orleans trolley photo. In the Delpine work, the faces of the white passengers are totally washed out, and the black faces are awkwardly lightened (someone apparently thought they were helping Frank's work). That's all corrected here. In this Steidl edition things are shown as they were intended. One can even see details in the face of the man at far left, even though it is partially obscured by a window reflection.
Also, on several photos more of the frame is visible. This was most noticeable to me in the Butte, Montana photo of the woman looking out the car window, with several children in the back seat. A good portion of the left side of the photo is now visible, along with more shown on the top and bottom. The new crop just seems more "right." Not too mention that the face of the child in the middle of the photo is too light in the older edition.
Simply put, comparing the two editions is an eye opener. I first saw these photos years ago in a much earlier edition (I believe it was the 1969 Aperture work) and I still marvel at the depth of the images in that printing. I don't have that edition in hand, so I can't do a direct comparison, but I believe the Steidl images are much closer to that ideal. Franks prefers his images a little on the flat, low-key side. Another difference is that the photos are now printed on a non-glossy paper. I was surprised at this at first, but now I believe it works much better for this book.
In short, if you want an accurate, lovingly-printed edition of The Americans at a reasonable price, this is the one. Highly recommended.
Book Review: Pictures that bring wry smiles
Summary: 5 Stars
I heard a bit about this terrific collection of Robert Frank photos on NPR, commemorating the 50th anniversary of its publication in the US. The collection is wonderful, with many shots of a side of 1950s America not usually seen by the public. Robert Frank lugged his camera to black funerals, dirty city streets and urban rooftops to capture the unglamorous -- yet very real -- people who lived there. Some of his images are startling and beautiful. A newsstand's stack of displayed magazines melds into the stacked framework of an office building; a statue of St. Francis, backlit against a murky sky, striding forward to preach repentance to the gas station across the street; an ugly jumble of rooftops is softened by gauzy curtains through which the image was shot.
There is plenty of understated social commentary to be seen as well. A city bus dashes by with its load of whites and blacks -- males and whites in the foremost seats, kids in the middle, blacks in the back -- that perfectly mirrors the social pecking order of the day. An overexposed image shows an older black women holding a white baby -- her presence the only splash of color in a world that is otherwise stark and white. And jukeboxes have never seemed so otherworldly than in Frank's images.
Nearly all of Frank's seemingly ordinary images carry some sort of a subtle bite or humorous twist. One of my favorite images is of a cowboy lighting a cigarette on a street in New York street -- and in the background is a truck with "Dodge" (as in Dodge City) in prominent letters. This sense of twisted fun and irony makes the photos viewable from an artistic level, exciting intellectually, but also fascinating from a social perspective. Frank's point of view is fairly obvious -- he opposes racial bigotry and marginalization of the poor -- but he is never condemnatory toward his subjects or to the story he is telling.
"The Americans" is a terrific collection from a gifted and humane artist. It will make you smile.
Book Review: The reality of America
Summary: 5 Stars
In this book, Robert Frank changed the way photography represented this country. When people hear "America," most of them think freedom, picnics, American flags, hot dogs, and cowboys. What they don't realize is that Frank's photographs show so much more than that. There is rarely any glamour, but what is shown is the real face of America.
With an introduction by Jack Kerouac, the reader gets a good idea of what they're about to see before they even lay eyes on the photographs. Kerouac praises Frank on how he captured "the humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and America-ness" of this country. Photographing in the mid-late 1950's, Frank traveled across the country to reveal the reality of America as opposed to the wonderful country that people around the world had envisioned. Each photograph is paired with a lone caption title leaving the reader to wonder the entire story behind the image: a gentleman sitting on a bench as a group of Yale graduates walk by him, a Jehovah's Witness holding a pamphlet, a half-clothed man sleeping on a blanket in the park, a couple at a charity ball--just to name a few. The cover photograph is outstanding as well, which is an image of the two white boys in the middle of the segregated train in between the whites and blacks became an iconic image; one that shows clearly one of the many segregation issues that citizens had to deal with on a daily basis during that historical movement.
There is nothing posed in the photographs, nothing set up or pre-planned... all of these photographs are made in the best way possible: candidly. Robert Frank saw this country in a new way and because of him most of us see it in that way as well. Kerouac says it best at the conclusion of his introduction: "Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucks a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking ran among the tragic poets of the world."
Book Review: Worth the Money
Summary: 4 Stars
The controversy surrounding this book is the perfectly natural - even compelled - result of the fact that 83 pictures cannot begin to represent the absolute infinite number of perspectives on life in the United States - or, the world, for that matter. Indeed, that it is titled "The Americans," with the intimation that it is a definitive photographic explication of the topic, demands the debate. Nevertheless, the pictures are deeply evocative and I am so pleased to have it in my library.
One other note on Mr. Frank. I became familiar with him through an interview on the Bob Edwards radio show related to the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication. In that interview, Mr. Frank noted that he saw southerners in the fifties as "arrogant in their righteousness," and went to express his gratitude that things had changed since then. Having been born in the deep south in 1954, and having lived here all my life, I share some of Mr. Frank's gratitude that things have changed. However, pockets of the South remain backwards, despite the changes that have taken place around them. In these pockets, folks remain overbearing in their righteousness - arrogant and primitive in their fundamentalist religious faith. Often as not they abuse - simply because they can get away with it - those who don't think according to their prescribed and, sadly, myopic "norms." In these areas, anti-intellectualism is seen as a positive character trait.
But, if you have a genuine interest in - and are open to the idea of - seeing the world through insightful eyes, you wouldn't be wasting your money on this book.