Looking at Robert Frank’s "The Americans"

by Terry Dunford (June 2011)

The critical literature on The Americans may be summarized as follows: the book is appreciated as long as it is viewed as a polemic rebuking American culture of the 1950s.

  Not to be outdone, yet another critic asserts that “Frank depicted America as a society with a deep-rooted sense of psychological isolation, what sociologist David Riesman called ‘the lonely crowd.’”[v] Reading commentary on The Americans is akin to reading menus from a dozen Chinese restaurants. They all sound the same. (And by the way, how can The Lonely Crowd be a “sociological study of the 1950s” when Riesman [and Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney] wrote their book in 1949?)     

As Francine Prose asked (with justification) upon visiting yet one more heavy-handed art show (in this case an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art):

[[ii] W.J.T Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 275.

[iii] Philip Brookman in Robert Frank: Moving Out, ed. Sarah Greenough and Philip Brookman (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art), 1994, p. 148.

[iv] Graham Clark, The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 155.

[v] Vicki Goldberg and Robert Silberman, American Photography: a Century of Images (San Francisco: Chronicle Books 1999), p. 147.  

[vi] Gerry Badger, “From Humanism to Formalism: Thoughts on Post-War American Photography,” American Images: Photography 1945-1980, ed., Peter Turner (New York: Penguin, 1985), p.15.

[vii] Newly minted cars are found in “Funeral – St. Helena, South Carolina,” “St. Petersburg, Florida,” “Drive-in movie – Detroit,” “St. Francis, gas station, and City Hall – Los Angeles,” “Chicago,” “San Francisco,” “Public park – Ann Arbor, Michigan.” 

[viii] No dingy diners in “Ranch market – Hollywood,” “Luncheonette – Butte, Montana,” “Restaurant – US 1 leaving Columbus, South Carolina,” “Cafeteria – San Francisco,” “Drug store – Detroit,” “Coffee shop, railway station – Indianapolis.”

[ix] Sarah Greenough, Robert Frank: Moving Out, p. 114.

[x] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, Grioux, 1977), p.56.

[xi] Leo Rubinfien, “Another Trip Through ‘The Americans,’” Art in America (May, 2009), p. 138.

[xii] Ibid, p. 145.

[xiii] Robert Frank by Robert Frank (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985) no pagination.

[xiv]  Francine Prose, “The Message Trumps the Medium at Whitney Biennial,” The Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2000, A28.

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