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ROBERT FRANK AND "THE AMERICANS" By Sarah Coleman The 50th Anniversary of Robert Frank's "The Americans" was recently celebrated with a special edition and an evening at Lincoln Center Article rating: 9.00

“That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured,” wrote Jack Kerouac in his introduction to “The Americans” in 1959. Kerouac went on to predict that Frank “will definitely be hailed as a great artist in his field,” but his certainty wasn’t shared by the book’s reviewers. When the book came out, Popular Photography magazine criticized the images’ “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.” Like most visionary artists, Frank had to wait for the public to catch up with him.

This year, Steidl Press is celebrating the 50th anniversary of “The Americans” (which was first published in Paris in 1958). A new edition of the book has been personally overseen by Frank himself, and designed to hew as closely as possible to his original vision. The book precedes an exhibition, “Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’,” which will open at the National Museum of Art in January 2009, and tour to San Francisco and New York later in the year.

Why is “The Americans” so important? These days, when so many photographers have followed in Frank’s footsteps, the book might seem obvious, even restrained. In the 1950s, though, in an era of hula hoops and Tupperware parties, it was hugely provocative. Frank’s startling, unsentimental images countered a national storyline that life in the postwar era was nothing but good. The economy was booming, middle-class homes were filled with shiny new appliances, and optimism flowed from every soda counter and gas pump – or so the story went.

This sanitized script was being largely followed by the era’s photographers too. In 1955, the Edward Steichen-curated exhibition “The Family of Man” put forward a sentimental vision of the Earth’s peoples as one big family, with Maasai warriors and French butchers engaged in similar rituals and daily travails. The public ate it up: “The Family of Man” was the most widely-viewed exhibition in MoMA’s history.

Then in stepped Robert Frank, a quiet Swiss man who was known for his fashion photography. A Jew who’d survived the Holocaust in Europe by the sheer luck of living in a neutral country, Frank understood social tension. He looked beyond the green suburban lawns and saw segregation, political corruption and anti-Communist paranoia. He saw dead-eyed factory workers, harried urbanites, lonely night shift waitresses. Then he took out his Leica and captured it all on film, eschewing the era’s straight lines and crisp focus and finding his own aesthetic of tilted angles, shadows and blur.

Frank, who’s now 84, is famously reclusive. He rarely grants interviews, and admits that “the one thing I hate to do is explain my pictures.” This May, though, he appeared for a 50th anniversary celebration of “The Americans” at the Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. The action-packed evening included a musical tribute to Frank, a screening of the photographer’s avant-garde movie “Pull My Daisy,” and a preview of the National Gallery of Art’s 2009 exhibition. But without doubt, the highlight was hearing Frank reminisce about shooting “The Americans.”

Dressed in his trademark John Deere baseball cap, looking more like a factory worker than a famous photographer, Frank sat in a red leather chair on stage and seemed mildly tickled by the attention he was receiving. “Photography is partly an accident,” he affirmed, after admitting that the cover image of “The Americans” was serendipitous. Everything about that image, from the sad eyes of a black man in the segregated back section of a New Orleans trolley car to the watery reflections in the upper windows, speaks volumes about a fearful, divided country. But when he shot it, Frank said, he “wasn’t aware of the way it was arranged.”

It’s not easy to interview someone as reticent as Frank, and Charlie LeDuff, the writer conducting the interview, started off on the wrong foot. Attempting to channel the Beat poets, he played the bongo drums and asked Frank, “How’s your asshole?” But the audience wasn’t having it. There were jeers and boos, and Frank quietly suggested that “you don’t have to imitate Kerouac, he’s gone.” This soon led to a more conventional interview, which was enlivened by Frank’s concise, sometimes playful answers.

“How good is this book?” LeDuff wanted to know. “Very good. No discussion,” Frank said, drawing laughs from the audience. He’d wanted, he said, to create a book that was “small and intimate,” which is why he reduced his 28,000 exposures made in 48 states down to 83 frames, presented in a modestly-sized book that was easy to hold and flip through. In terms of subject matter, though, the book was large and uncompromising. “It was an unsentimental look at America,” Frank said.

“The Americans” is notable for the way in which it focuses on all strata of American society – young and old, rich and poor, white and black. Published at the beginning of the Civil Rights era, it offered a forceful depiction of strained race relations, but also showed black people at ease in their own communities. Why did Frank choose to photograph so many minorities? “They looked more attractive than white people,” the photographer explained, smiling impishly.

His favorite image in the book? Simply titled “New York,” it features three Puerto Rican gay men on the Lower East Side. Interestingly, this is one of the few pictures in which the subjects are aware of the photographer’s presence and acknowledge it, mugging for the camera with exaggerated poses. Mostly, Frank said, he tried to be as unobtrusive as possible because “people saw you with a camera, taking photographs, and their reaction was, you’re a Communist.” The taboo-breaking Puerto Ricans were an exception. “It’s one of the happiest photographs in the book. There’s something to be learned from that,” Frank said.

Ironically, the book that captured a blistering view of American society turned Frank into an American. Embraced by the Beat Generation’s writers and poets, slowly recognized as an important artist, he found that he didn’t want to go back to Switzerland. And so, audience members wanted to know, does he feel like an American now? Or is he the eternal outsider, looking in? “It’s good to be alive, whatever nationality you are,” Frank said, but then, leaning forward, he became serious for a moment. “People here have a largesse,” he said. “I’m grateful to have become an American.”

At 84, Frank said, he still likes to go out on the street and look at people. He feels an affinity with Edward Hopper and likes to look at the paintings done by his wife, June Leaf, but mostly, he said, he’s just jazzed by watching people negotiate the small transactions of everyday life. Photographers everywhere are surely grateful that, fifty years ago, Frank turned his blunt gaze on America and created a book that changed the landscape of contemporary photography.

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