Word: frankly
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...When Frank first shopped his photos around, no American publisher wanted anything to do with them, so they first appeared in book form in France in 1958. One year later a U.S. edition was brought out by Grove Press, the combative imprint that had published Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch. The Grove edition came with an introduction by no less a hipster than Jack Kerouac. Whatever you think of his feverish prose ("The charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power ..."), in one lovely line Kerouac got the book just right...
That book was The Americans (Steidl; 180 pages). To mark its 50th anniversary, it's being reissued this month. And Frank's masterpiece is reappearing at the same time as another almost literally groundbreaking photo book. The New West (Aperture; 120 pages), which first came out in 1974, was Robert Adams' bid to document the world of Ansel Adams--no relation--being devoured by the forces of environmental degradation and suburban sprawl. Both these books changed what it was possible to show. More than that, they changed what it was possible...
...Frank read his adopted nation as very few other photographers had in the mid-1950s. He saw it through the filter of his own somber disposition, to be sure, but with a conviction that the most direct route into the heart of things was by way of what were supposed to be the margins. He liked to be anyplace he could find people who were forlorn, pensive, manic or needy. Exaltation attracted him too. What other word to apply to the mood of that intense man in white praying at the water's edge in Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana...
...Frank put it later, his goal was to make pictures that would constitute "an authentic contemporary document; the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation." Which they did--and then some. The parameters of American photography in the 1950s were largely set by magazines like LIFE and Look. More often than not, their taste ran to shots that were crisp as an apple, easily deciphered, and put a bright spin on things. Frank's were blurred, murky, tilted and mysterious. In Parade--Hoboken, New Jersey, the Stars and Stripes flutter between two bunkered enigmas, an image radically...
Very soon more conventional critics got hold of Frank's book. "Sick" and "joyless" were two of the milder terms they used. But in the 1960s, amid the general dismantling of all national certainties, The Americans was revisited and then very quickly understood as indispensable. For one thing, it brought to American photography the same tragic dimension that American fiction had arrived at long before. It also paved the way for a new kind of documentary photography, one that was more personal and idiosyncratic and much stranger. Because of The Americans, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, virtuosos of the mordant...