Customer Reviews

The Americans

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Like an elusive text in search of itself, Robert Frank's 1958 book The Americans has changed format each of the four times it's changed publishers. From the text heavy French version to the oversized aperture reprint, Frank has continued to refine his work each time it appears in print.

In the Scalo version, the place-name captions have been removed from the pages opposite the photographs and collected in the back of the book. Forget any ideas you might have of Frank's book being a travelogue. In place of the itinerary, the Scalo edition finally establishes the ORDER of the book's photographs as the crucial ingredient in Frank's complex vision of America. The 83-photograph sequence cuts between elliptical narrative of the open road and comparative sociology of dead-end lives as Frank turns free association into inescapable logic and then back again. The result is the most masterful combination of photographs in book form.

The subjects of Frank's photographs roam this fractured typology like prophets locked in an unstable time loop. Geography no longer takes center stage as the formative element of their photographic selves. In some small but significant way, the americans in the Scalo edition reclaim the intentionality of their sadness, anger, and alienation. The bitter and often unwilling nature of their engagements with Frank take center stage, each as profound an act of refusal as Frank's own denunciation of the pasteboard optimism of '50s America.

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.

Robert Frank with this small little book changed the course of photography. He changed the way people take photographs. He changed the way we look at photographs. He changed the definition of what was an acceptable or good photograph. The way Monet and Picasso changed how one could paint, Frank changed the way one could photograph.

How did he do this? He basically introduced the "icongraphic photograph" to the world. Take for example, his picture in the Americans of a political rally for Ike. It is of a man standing against a blank wall, playing the tuba. But the tuba's opening obscures his face, all you see is the big blank dark opening of the the tuba where his eyes and mouth are suppossed to be. And then right behind the tuba, almost coming out of it, a flag, an American flag, though shapeless, and formless and it snakes out of the picture. On the man's lapel is a big "For Ike" button. At the time, this was a radical photograph and statement about politics and the role of the individual in political life; remember this was 1957.

There are many many many other photographs like this throughout the Americans: St. Peter taking on City Hall. The American flag covering the faces of the people at a parade. The jukebox everywhere. The signs screaming "No Negroes Allowed" while on the next page is a photograph of an older black women holding in her arms, caring for, a young white baby. Frank clearly asking, screaming, why is it okay for them to care your for babies but not okay for them to use the same toilet as you?

It is a subtle but very powerful book. And once you see it, once you get it, you can never see a photograph the same way again.

He has influenced every photographer who has come after him.
Without Robert Frank there would be no Gary Winograd, Eugene Richards, Gilles Peres, William Klien, Bruce Davidson, Alex Webb, Salgado, Danny Lyon, James Nachtwey, Lauren Greenblatt, Ron Haviv, or Herb Ritts.

This book is the starting point for anyone interested in photography, or at least photography after 1958 when this book was first published.

this is the only book to buy if you are interested in photography. every image is true. if you ever have a chance to view the actual prints, don't miss them. i have learned more about photography from looking at this book than any other source. it is a masterpiece.

In 1955, Swiss photographer Robert Frank traveled around the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The images he created were published first in France in 1958, and then the following year in America. Highly controversial in its day, "The Americans" gave us a much needed outsiders view of who we are as a people.

Frank is an incredibly skilled image maker, able communicate on many different levels with a single image. Jack Kerouac is the perfect person to write the intro to this book. Both artists worked in a similar way, using travel, speed and chance to communicate fleeting, yet deep, feelings about our complex culture.

Perfectly enjoyable by anyone with an interest in American culture, but essential for those practicing documentary photography.

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!

This book was not by Jack Kerouac. It's by Robert Frank. It's one of the seminal books in the history of photography. Many see it as a hate letter to America, but that's a shallow reading of the book. It's some of the best documentary done by a non-documentarian of the American culture of the period. If you really want to see great photography with a point of view, this is a good start.

I find lots of listings get authorship wrong when the book is about a photographer's work. Amazon needs to fix this basic flaw in their system.

The Americans is perhaps the most influential photography book published in the last 40 years. Swiss-born Robert Frank's images must have seemed completely revolutionary and startling when published in 1958. Frank used his camera to cut through the facade of a country that was beginning to build up its crust of macadam and marketing. Frank shot with available light using film that would be considered very slow by today's standards, yet his images, while many have visible grain, are gorgeous and have a full range of tones. To describe the images themselves is fruitless. Buy the book

This is a wonderful monograph of Frank's early work, presented in a highly innovative sequence of images based loosly on formal and thematic topics. The book's meaning grows and changes with every read. Although it is hailed as a seminal work of progressive street photography now, it was not so warmly received in its postwar days. For instance, in 1960 a critic for Popular Photography called it, "A sad poem for a sick people." However, Frank maintained an aloof political stance and managed to escape McCarthyism's career-ending scrutiny, unlike many of his coleagues.
If you like this book, you might enjoy Walker Evans' "American Photographs" and Tod Papageorge's comparison of the two photo-books. Also see Frank's later works, as seen in the retrospective "The Lines of My Hand" and such extensive exhibition catalogues as "Hold Still-Keep Going" and "Moving Out." Frank's later body of work reveals a preoccupation with the passage of time, perhaps inspired by his 40+ years in film. These photos also bear negative scratching, collage, over-painting, and the deliberate addition of text--all of which vastly different from his Americans-era images. Although these photographic accomplishments, stunning in their own right, have been ignored by scholarship for some time, the 1990s establishment of the Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery promises to preserve as well as present Frank's later works in a new and interesting light.

Also:
Dear Benjamin,

Per your inquiry, Robert Frank's book was published in Switzerland because the photographer is SWISS. Scalo has made an effort to publish most of Frank's books in his home country, as well as the US, England, France, Canada (where he lives now), etc. Frank emigrated to the US in 1947 and became an American citizen in 1963. Knowing these simple facts might help you examine this work with renewed clarity. Also, people in Switzerland enjoy books just as much as Americans. Perhaps you should conduct some research every now and again, it might make you look less ignorant.

In 1955 - 1956, Robert Frank (b. 1924), an American photographer born in Switzerland, restlessly crossed the United States several times by car to photograph people and places as he found them. He gradually culled through thousands of photographs to select 83 images for his book, "The Americans" published initially in Paris in 1958 and in the United States in 1959 by Grove Press. In its initial publication, "The Americans" sold only 600 copies and received negative reviews. Its stature has grown with time. The book is now an American icon.

The United States publication of "The Americans" included an introduction by Frank's friend, Jack Kerouac, which had earlier been rejected by the French publisher. Frank did well in asking Kerouac to write the introduction. Years earlier, Kerouac had made a series of mad journeys across the United States resulting in his famous novel, "On the Road." Kerouac's book shows more of a romantic spirit than the unsentimental photographs taken by his friend. Kerouac's introduction captures the spirit of Frank's photographs and of Frank's portrayal of America and offers comments on several individual photos. It deserves its place as part of Frank's masterwork.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the book, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. presented a major exhibition of Frank's work, titled "Looking In" which included the 83 photographs of "The Americans" presented in the order of Frank's book, together with other photographs that Frank took, including many photographs he took while he crossed America that did not make their way into the book. I was fortunate to visit the exhibition yesterday to see the photographs first hand. The National Gallery of Art has also published an encyclopedic version of Frank's book, "Looking In" which is large and expensive and includes much material in addition to Frank's now iconic collection of 83 photographs. My review here is of Frank's initial collection with Kerouac's introduction. The book is much less expensive than the reissue, is easier to handle, and provides the original version of Frank's masterpiece.

Frank's pictures do indeed draw the view into the scenes he depicts. The photographs include men and women, whites and blacks, rich and poor. The photographs show a certain loneliness, isolation, and unhappiness, regardless of social class. Thus, there are photographs of a lovely young woman operating an elevator, and of a hard-faced young woman behind a restaurant counter staring fixedly at the viewer. There is a photograph of a wealthy couple in Miami, of lavishly dressed gamblers at a Nevada casino, and of the elegant guests at a New York City cocktail party, drinks in hand, to benefit a school of art. Frank shows a segregated bus in New Orleans, and a scene of a stoic African American nurse holding a white baby in South Carolina. He photographs places, as well, a bar in Detroit, a collection of rubbish in the back yard of a Los Angeles home, that reminded me of works by Charles Bukowski, and the starkness of a men's bathroom and shoeshine stand - which Kerouac described as a place where the ladies don't go.

The photographs suggest the fascination of American's with their cars - one of the best works in the collection is the picture of the dividing strip of an open road at moonlight. They also show the fascination of many American's with the products of Hollywood - with starlets, cowboys, and television - together with the inauthenticity and emptiness of these concerns. Politicians, such as the photograph of the "city fathers" of Hoboken, New Jersey early in the collection, and of wheeling-dealing. cigar-smoking delegates at the Democratic Party's Presidential convention in 1956 (all men) come across as arrogant, crude, and ignorant. Many of the photographs are draped with flags, or other symbols, and many include comments on American religion, from an African American preacher who traveled up and down the Mississippi River for years to bring people to God, to the crosses, churches, and calls to repentance that dot the American landscape, to orthodox American Jews at the banks of the East River on Yom Kippur casting their sins into the water.

For all the melancholy, loneliness, and shallowness they convey, Frank's photographs show an understanding of the United States and a love of its people and places. His photographs of young people capture the alienation that has become commonplace since the 1950s, but also the search for love and meaning. His photographs capture the breadth of the United States, the difficulties of race relations, and the feelings of desolation, conformity, and tension, as people strive for financial security.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to see Frank's photographs themselves at the National Gallery. This book of Frank's 83 photographs, together with Kerouac's words, offers the reader the opportunity to share, return to, and reflect upon Frank's photographic vision.

Robin Friedman