US: This is what we’re like

Between April 1955 and June 1956, Robert Frank climbed into a Ford coupe and drove about 10,000 miles to photograph Americans. He carried a Leica, shooting here and there to capture what he found, and he returned from the trip with roughly 780 rolls of film — about 28,000 images; from all of them he selected 83 to assemble The Americans, which was published in 1958 and can now be seen in an exhibition in Madrid at the Fundación Telefónica as part of the annual photography festival PHotoEspaña. “Such an American image,” writes Jack Kerouac in the book’s introduction, “the faces neither manipulate nor criticize nor say anything except ‘This is how we are in real life, and if you don’t like it, I don’t care because I live my life my way, and may God bless us all — maybe… ‘if we deserve it…'” There are some somewhat provocative young men in New York, some stale politicians in Hoboken, an elevator operator in Miami Beach, and a few very elegant Black people at a funeral in St. Helena, South Carolina. Frank’s book doesn’t capture the American Dream that was sold to the rest of the world in the 1950s; the people he portrays are ordinary (even ugly), and some critics at the time branded him a communist.

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