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.
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.
