Robert FrankThe Americans
Photographs: Robert Frank
Text: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Apeture/ Grossman Publishers
Pictures: 83
Year: 1969
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It is difficult now to remember how schocking Robert Frank's book was then years ago. The pictures took us by ambush then. We knew the America that they described, of course, but we knew it as one knows the background hum in a record player, not as a fact to recognize and confront. Nor had we understood that this stratum of our experience was a proper concern of artists.
The fact that Frank's America wans not in conventional terms edifying was not the point. The shocking thing was that is was not in conventional terms tragic, but merely untidy and trival. Yet Frank recorded with such clarity and purity his own sense of what was basic to us that the trivial was transfigured, and became symbol. Robert Frank established a new iconography for contemporary America, comprised of bits of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces. This iconography has become a common coin, used now perhaps too easily as a substitute for observation. But here in the original the acuity of Frank's own sensibility is alive and relevant.
John Szarkowski
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