In his introduction to the iconic book of photographs, The Americans, Jack Kerouac wrote, You Got Eyes, honoring photographer Robert Frank as if he were a jazzman, You Can Play. Now these words are writ large at the Metropolitan Museum's fine show, Looking In, exhibiting the 83 photos that were published in the original book from the mid-1950's, some contact sheets that reveal much about how this artist made his choices and cropped his work, as well as earlier photo sequences and related essays and correspondence. The result is a thrilling glimpse into the development of Frank's unique sensibility, and a prophetic time capsule. There aren't many works that changed the way people see: this book is one of them.
The Americans, like Kerouac's On the Road, reflects a cross-country car trip. Its vision is a sad America of individuals caught in a wide expanse of highways, connecting, but not, disenfranchised from the American Dream. Robert Frank, having recently arrived from Switzerland, made the trip on a Guggenheim scholarship in 1955-6, and its look at America is one that you could argue can only be seen by an outsider: An empty chair in a barbershop seen through a screen door in McClellanville, South Carolina. U.S. 285 in New Mexico, the line dividing the road leading to a hazy horizon. Drugstore in Detroit, the black counter woman serving whites with large posters advertising "Orange Whip 10 cents" looming overhead. A movie premiere in Hollywood shows a glamorous blond with a far off gaze, background animated onlookers in focus. Robert Frank's family huddled in the back seat of a car, its headlight beaming.
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition features excellent essays providing the backstory to Frank's road trip as well as the history of the book's critical reception. Luc Sante relates the vision in The Americans to another Frank/Kerouac collaboration, the film Pull My Daisy. "The intersection of the two men may have lasted less than two years, finally, but it was momentous, with echoes that have persisted ever since. The road they separately traveled and chronicled has done nothing but expand in the popular imagination, becoming the site for a paradigmatic rite of passage."
Interestingly enough, the opening of the Met's exhibition coincides with the release of Michael Moore's new satiric opus, "Capitalism: A Love Story," and the timing could not be more apt, as each reveals an underbelly of America, beatific citizens somehow left behind. With respect to Obama-bashers and their ilk, these are "real Americans," for anyone with eyes.
Advertisement