In 1955, at age 31 and supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank began travels through the United States, going from coast to coast. A shiny postwar consumer culture was on the rise, but not everywhere. Frank pushed past the clichés and captured the truth. White men on barstools sipping milkshakes. Lonely dive bars in the Midwest. Slovenly crowds on Canal Street, New Orleans. And trolleys where Black patrons were relegated to the back seats.

Frank in his New York studio, photographed by Keating in 2002.

Of the 28,000 photographs he took over two years, 83 were presented in The Americans, a book published in 1958. It wasn’t pretty. A “wart-covered picture of America,” wrote a reviewer in Popular Photography magazine. Another critic called the book a “sad poem for sick people.” And yet, these raw, gritty snapshots of the real America inspired the aesthetic of a generation.

Photographer Edward Keating, born in 1956—a year into Frank’s American odyssey—shared the older man’s refusal to settle for idyllic images. In the 1990s, when Keating was hired as a New York Times staff photographer, Frank became a mentor. In 2000, a year before capturing the wreckage of 9/11 up close, he, too, took to the road and headed for Middle America. Over the next decade, he spent time on Route 66—America’s Main Street—documenting ruined dolls hanging from guardrails, petroleum-streaked Tulsa riverbanks, Chicago sidewalks, and desolate bus stops.

Edward Keating photographed by Robert Frank in 2011.

Keating took 25,000 photos; 84 made it into his 2018 book, Main Street—one more than Frank had included in The Americans. Frank died the following year. In 2021, Keating succumbed to cancer, as a result of being exposed to toxicity at Ground Zero.

“America in its decisive decade,” writes the American journalist Charlie LeDuff in Edward Keating, Main Street: The Lost Dream of Route 66. “That’s what Keating has captured with his mechanical eye.” —Elena Clavarino

“Edward Keating: A Fearless Legacy” is on at the Carriage Barn Arts Center, in New Canaan, Connecticut, until November 13; “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” is on at MoMA, in New York, until January 11, 2025; “Edward Keating, Main Street: The Lost Dream of Route 66” will open at the Leica Gallery in Los Angeles on November 14

Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air Mail

Photos: © the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation (Jagger, London, James, Keating); © Edward Keating/Contact Press Images/Main Street: The Lost Dream of Route 66, Damiani, 2018 (Los Angeles; Galena; Joplin, both; Sunset Boulevard; East St. Louis; Sayre; Tulsa); Robert Frank/The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Gift of the artist (Baldwin); Robert Frank/National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Robert Frank Collection/Gift of Robert Frank (Kerouac); the Museum of Modern Art, New York/Acquired by exchange with the artist (Mabou Winter Footage); © Edward Keating/Contact Press Images/Carriage Barn Arts Center (woman hailing taxi; West 106th Street, both; Bronx); © Edward Keating/Contact Press images (Frank on roof, Frank and Leaf, Frank at home, drawing, Frank in studio)