If you are a photographer or like me, a hobbyist, Robert Frank’s The Americans is one of those books you must see.

At least that is what I’ve heard repeatedly from photographers’ websites and YouTube channels. So, when I had the opportunity to pick it up a new hardback still in its shrinkwrap for half the retail price, there was no internal debate. I just pulled it off the shelf and stuck it under my arm, and continued the hunt for other great finds.

My first impression of this photo book was that, well, it wasn’t what I expected.

After being referred to as “One of the most important photography compilations of the twentieth century,” I had very high hopes for what treasures I would find between the front and back cover, hopes which honestly were not fulfilled, and I was left scratching my head in confusion. Because of the praise I had heard, I expected to be wowed by these photos, and I wasn’t.

And this is where we all have a choice.

When faced with such a disparity between what was expected and what was delivered, you can proceed in a number of ways:

Assume your opinion is the correct one and everyone else is an idiot
Pretend to agree with the popular opinion so you don’t seem like an idiot to others
Reevaluate your expectations, examine your opinion, and seek understanding

and of course, there are other options; I chose the 3rd.

Context

When trying to understand something, it really is your responsibility to first put it in its correct context. Outside of the correct context, almost everything will be misunderstood. Unfortunately, the book itself does not give you much context, forcing you to go elsewhere (I’ve included a few Youtube videos under ‘References’ at the end of this post).

Before doing research on this book, I had only heard people sing its praise. However, The Americans has also received its share of criticism. When the book was first published in 1958, it was labeled by many as anti-American. Other similar criticisms represent The Americans as a hate-filled European propaganda piece against America; the photos deliberately being chosen to misrepresent American life to the rest of the world.

What I found during my limited research is that Robert Frank was a photographer and filmmaker who, in 1948, emigrated to the United States from Switzerland. As I understand it, Robert was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship sometime in the 1950s, resulting in a financial grant to travel across the US to shoot Americans in everyday life. According to the introduction, Robert “photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.” And if you flip the publication pages in the back of the book, you’ll find that all the images were taken in the years 1955 and 1956. Contextually, that is why this work is historically significant.

The post-war 1950s were the heyday of a growing middle class but it was also a time when America was “deep in the throes of a civil rights movement.” In The Americans, Robert photographs the wealthy at cocktail parties, Hollywood premiers, politicians, and a Yale Commencement ceremony, but he also photographs African Americans, lower-class or impoverished Americans of varying ethnicities, including white, and other disenfranchised Americans. He also photographed bars, funerals, assembly lines, and even a shoe-shine stall in a men’s restroom.

*Men’s room, railway station - Memphis, Tennessee*

The Americans isn’t about technically correct photography or expertly developed film. It also isn’t about the usual depictions of happy, smiling, middle-class America that was the normal portrait of America at that time, forever immortalized in TV sitcoms and movies. The Americans is a photojournalism piece on how Robert Frank saw America as he traveled this immense country. His intent was to show the “other” America, not the popular middle-class one. Any photographer worth his salt, especially one paid to travel a country and come back with an interesting story, isn’t going to bring back a trunk full of photos representing the normal everyday life that everyone expects to see.

Now, given the context of this book and what it was intended to communicate, I can return to the photos with new expectations. Flipping through the exact same pages, and looking at the exact same photos, I see them differently. I now understand, at least in some part, what was intended and I can view them and evaluate them with a different measure.

Now that my expectations have changed, I very much like what I see in The Americans. Is there personal bias here? Absolutely. Just like there is in everything anyone has ever done. Is there anything to be angry about as some people want you to believe? Not that I can see. These are real pictures of real people, living real lives. The thing is, I grew up in the lower-middle class. I grew up in the south and southwest US. I have relatives who owned farms, lived in small towns, and others who lived in near poverty at some point in their lives. Many of the pictures I see in The Americans remind me of the America that is familiar to me, even if the photos were from a few decades earlier. Given my own background, there is nothing here that is shocking or rings of anti-establishment, and certainly not anti-American. Maybe in post-WWII America, Robert’s The Americans wasn’t the America that many wanted to be advertised but these photos do represent an America and Americans that existed then, and in many ways, still exists today.

Interestingly, Walker Evans, post WWI, also traveled around the US and took photos of tenant farmers and later people impoverished by the Great Depression. Some say Robert Frank was influenced by Walker Evans, and if I ever get my hands on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye, it would be an interesting study as to why Evans’ work is thought of as an important historical work, while Frank’s was labeled anti-American.