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.
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