Robert Frank, Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955/56; from Robert Frank: The Americans (Aperture, 2024). © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation Few photographers captured postwar America as honestly as Robert Frank. Regarded as one of the most influential and enduring works of American photography, his seminal series The Americans earned him comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of the post-war American society.
Created during a series of road trips through the United States in the 1950s, the series challenged the nation's self-image of the time. Through images of highways, parades, cars, diners, jukeboxes, and other quintessential symbols, Frank revealed an underlying sense of alienation and hardship. He explored the garish absurdities and poignant contradictions of American culture, constructing a visual narrative that defined the era. His book redefined what a photobook could be—personal, poetic, and real—ultimately changing the course of the twentieth-century photography.
Marking the centennial of Frank's birth, and concurrent with a major exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art this fall, Aperture will release a new edition of this classic. The new Aperture release preserves the exceptional tritone printing from the 2008 edition, in which Frank was personally involved at every stage of the design and production process. It also includes the original introduction by Beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac, further cementing the cultural significance and impact of Frank’s work.
“Frank's point of view—at once startling and tenacious—is imbued with humanity and lyricism, painting a searing portrait of a nation full of promise and contradiction. This is a timeless book that shows the power of photography to shine a probing light on the world around us,” said Sarah Meister, Executive Director, Aperture.
Born in Zurich in 1924, Robert Frank arrived in New York in 1947, eager to leave behind his father's radio-importing business. He worked as a commercial photographer while spending his free time wandering the city, capturing scenes that caught his eye. In 1954, he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship with references from Walker Evans and Edward Steichen, proposing "an observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States." Determined to photograph America as it unfolded before him, he sought to create work free from commercial constraints, resulting in a groundbreaking book imbued with an iconoclastic spirit.
Driving a newly purchased Ford, Frank embarked on three road trips across the United States over two years, often accompanied by his wife and two young children. Documenting American society across all its layers, he shot 28,000 photographs on 767 rolls of film. His journey began in Pennsylvania and Ohio, then took him to Michigan, where he gained rare access to photograph inside Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn. However, his travels were not without challenges. During the Cold War's tense atmosphere, Frank was jailed for three days in Arkansas on suspicions of being a communist spy. In another incident in the South, a sheriff ordered him to leave town within an hour.
Robert Frank's The Americans revolutionized both photography and how Americans perceived themselves. His subjects weren't living the American dream of the 1950s. They were factory workers in Detroit, transvestites in New York, black passengers on a segregated trolley in New Orleans, a cowboy pausing to roll a cigarette in midtown Manhattan, or a man in front of the jukebox with an empty dance floor behind him. Frank rarely interacted with his subjects; instead, he pointed, shot, and moved on. He documented life as it unfolded in luncheonettes, public parks, roadside bars, and factories., capturing ordinary people in everyday moments.
His images lacked traditional beauty spots, focusing instead on cars, diners, postcard racks, gas stations, hotel lobbies, or strip developments. His shots were not artfully framed or carefully balanced, breaking the conventions of acceptable photojournalism. These symbols of contemporary life were captured in raw, unpolished compositions: blurred foregrounds, tilted horizons, and seemingly casual framing broke away from the conventions of photojournalism.
Beneath the surface of American life, lay a profound sense of alienation, loneliness, and tension. Frank illuminated the disparity between the glossy image of postwar American culture and its underlying realities—racism, violence, and consumerism. By simply presenting things as they were, he exposed the postwar American way of life in stark black and white, revealing the chasm between the American dream and everyday reality. He found tension in the gloss of American culture and wealth, revealing a sad, hard and divided country that seemed essentially melancholic.
Robert Frank approached editing his images with meticulous precision and rigor. From 27,000 photographs, he whittled them down to about 1,000 prints, which he spread across his studio floor and pinned to the walls for a comprehensive final edit. Ultimately, he selected just 83 images from a year and a half of work. The resulting sequence and pacing of the photographs are strikingly fresh, rich, and deliberate, reflecting the narrative depth that shaped his vision for the book and his broader approach to photography.
The book unfolds in four sections, each opening with an image of the American flag. The rhythm alternates between motion and stillness, presence and absence, creating a compelling interplay. Frank used thematic, formal, and conceptual links to craft a deliberate structure, imbued with a strong narrative voice and a distinct sense of order. The result is a masterpiece that is as much about the sequencing and pacing of the images as it is about the individual photographs themselves.
Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Robert Frank met the writer Jack Kerouac on the sidewalks outside a party and showed him the photographs from his road trips. Kerouac immediately agreed to write an essay about the works. Published as an introduction to the first American edition, that was released a year after the French one, Kerouac's text is a perfect complement to the photographs. The famous Beat writer wrote:
Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps, and with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America on to film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.
However, the pictures caught the public and contemporary critics off guard, provoking a mix of scorn and outrage. The Americans disrupted the polished image the nation wished to project, exposing a reality many chose to ignore. In the USA, the book faced harsh criticism, seen by some as an affront to national ideals. Support from the art world was notably absent.
Minor White, the renowned photographer and Aperture magazine editor called it "a wart-covered picture of America by a joyless man." The magazine Popular Photography described it as "a sad poem by a very sick person" and derided Frank's images as "meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness." As Frank recalled, not even MoMA would sell the book and it quickly went out of print after selling 1,100 copies.
These critiques reflected a deep discomfort with the mirror Frank held up to American society. The disapproval embodied the shock of a nation unaccustomed to seeing itself in such an unflattering light. Frank's images challenged the dominant narratives of postwar prosperity and optimism, pointing to the alienation, inequality, and struggles beneath the surface. In this sense, the critical response to The Americans was not only a rejection of Frank’s artistic approach but also a reflection of the broader cultural tensions he was actively confronting.
However, Kerouac's introduction did help the book reach a larger audience due to the popularity of the Beat phenomenon. Over the years, The Americans and its author ultimately received the long-deserved recognition and acclaim, reshaping the way we view the power of photography as a medium for social commentary.
No other book has influenced contemporary photography as much as The Americans. It challenged the documentary tradition, which viewed photography as transparent and simplistic, devoid of the photographer’s thoughts, emotions, or perspective. Robert Frank rebelled against the 1950s idea that photography was a universal language, easily understood by everyone. Instead, he created an ambiguous form of work that engages viewers and leaves them with as many questions as answers. By experimenting with composition, blur, exposure, and grain, Frank also pushed against the prevailing aesthetic of technical perfection, which emphasized clean, well-exposed, and sharp images.
The influence of Frank's formal iconoclasm and a defiantly unromantic gaze is evident in nearly every street photographer who followed. Photographer Ed Ruscha described the experience of seeing The Americans as "a stunning, ground-trembling experience," but added that Frank's work was so complete and unique that it pushed him to find his own voice.
But I realized this man's achievement could not be mined or imitated in any way, because he had already done it, sewn it up and gone home. What I was left with was the vapors of his talent. I had to make my own kind of art. But wow! The Americans!
Joel Meyerowitz, a pioneer of color photography, also noted how Frank's work deeply influenced his generation. The Americans led them "out into the American landscape," and Meyerowitz recalled being struck by Frank's ability to find meaning in seemingly ordinary scenes, such as his photograph of pedestrians on Canal Street in New Orleans. Yet, as he recalled, he was first puzzled with this image, wondering why Frank decided to shoot this undifferentiated mass of pedestrians.
Over time, I came to realize that the reasons for making a photograph and what it may mean to you later are two different things, and what it means to somebody else is yet another. This image came to life for me years after I first puzzled about it, when I was undertaking a transformation in my own work and realized that Robert had planted a seed that was then sprouting.
Sociologist Howard S. Becker, known for his work on the sociology of art, recognized the depth and complexity of Frank's The Americans, drawing parallels between the book and major works of social analysis. He compared Frank's photographic journey through American life to de Tocqueville's insightful study of American institutions, as well as the cultural analyses of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.
Frank presents photographs made in scattered places around the country, returning again and again to such themes as the flag, the automobile, race, restaurants - eventually turning those artifacts, by the weight of the associations in which he embeds them, into profound and meaningful symbols of American culture.
Robert Frank’s influence on the world of photography is undeniable, but his perspective on the medium itself was starkly different from the prevailing notions of his time. He did not see photography as merely a tool for documenting reality, but as an artistic practice capable of expressing subjective truths and raw emotional landscapes. His works, such as The Americans, redefined the medium and shifted the way people viewed the American experience. Yet, by the time of his 2004 interview with The Guardian, Frank believed that the kind of photography he had pioneered had already passed its prime.
There are too many pictures now. It's overwhelming. A flood of images that passes by, and says, 'why should we remember anything?' There is too much to remember now, too much to take in.
It’s difficult to imagine the evolution of photography—both its past and present—without the sharpness of Frank’s insight. As art historian and photographic critic Ian Jeffrey described, he had an exceptional ability to "invest the seemingly commonplace with supplementary qualities." Through the cold, hard truth of an outsider’s gaze, Frank crafted a new American iconography and transformed photography itself—what it could express and how.
