The career of the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank stands in direct antithesis to the characteristics of his native Switzerland. Switzerland sucked the air out of him, he claimed, through its orderliness, decorum, neatness and predictability.
As R. J. Smith’s vivid biography explains, Frank displays none of these traits. Just as coming to America was a form of escape, so he has never remained content with one genre or style of work — despite, or perhaps because of, the huge, influential success of The Americans, his photographic portrayal of a divided nation full of contradictions. Smith is adept at reading the visual language of Frank’s images and films, but this biography is, above all, an inquiry into what makes this talented, private, curmudgeonly and loyalty-inspiring man tick.
The Americans, published first in France in 1958, and the following year in the United States, is the work (as he promised in his successful application for a Guggenheim fellowship) of a new American recording what he saw on the road. He revelled in the extraordinariness of the ordinary. His method was simple: arrive in a new town; check into a no-star hotel near the bus station; go to Woolworth’s and order a Coke; visit the cemetery, maybe a golf course, and see what turns up. The Americans has no unfolding narrative, but it is unified by its many images of automobiles, symbols of a wide country; of crosses; of windows and of signage — Frank borrows from his one notable American influence, Walker Evans, in this and other respects.
Smith rightly credits Frank’s own influence on later photographers, such as Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, who similarly document the strangeness of America through telling angles and visual juxtapositions.
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