The Americans

The Robert Frank show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art isn't a blockbuster, and that's what's great about it. Frank was a Swiss-born Jew who emigrated to the United States shortly after the end of the Second World War. He made the acquaintance of photography pioneers like Edward Steichen and Walker Evans, and with Evans help received a 1955 Guggenheim Fellowship to travel across America and record what he saw on film. The resulting book had 83 black-and-white images from hundreds of rolls Frank shot all over the country. He turned his lens on both what was hopeful about the United States--the country that defeated variants of nationalistic fascism in Europe and Asia--as well as what was troubling and bleak. He caught the racism that persisted a century after the Civil War; at the first crest of the long, postwar economic boom, he caught the poverty and bleakness in the shallows; and he caught the darkness that the brilliance of that boom obscured.
In the show, the photographs from the book are laid out in sequence; they're framed simply and similarly, with identifying cards making explicit (at times, perhaps too explicit) the subtler visual connections that Frank and his editors carefully worked into the sequence. Frank's original letters and applications to the Guggenheim Foundation are included, along with various drafts and correspondence between Frank and Jack Kerouac, who wrote an introduction to the volume. The images are largely informal, candid, in the vein of Walker Evans's iconic photos for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Others are like Brassai's interior shots; still others are out of focus, askew. Many of the original contact sheets are included, and one can see the broader sense of vision with which the images were cropped.
Frank experienced racism on his road trips, but remained circumspect about it; the incidents, which included jail time and verbal humiliation by officers of the law, can almost be read as part of the subtext Frank was seeking, that he sensed was out there, waiting to be recorded. As others have noticed, the book is in the tradition of the Outsider Gazing at America, like de Tocqueville, Dickens, Frances Trollope in the 19th century. But unlike those, more critical, caustic takes, Frank's book is subtly affectionate, perhaps even optimistic and hopeful.