Arts & Entertainment
Young Americans
Robert Frank’s iconic
portraits turn 50
BY HEATHER JOHNSON
Rodeo—New York City, 1954
A snapshot of New Orleans: The windows of a streetcar make a filmstrip
out of random humanity, each frame
revealing someone with a wildly different reaction to the world—suspicion,
curiosity, desolation or disinterest. The
photo could have been taken yesterday
but, as it happens, it was shot more than
five decades ago by a quiet, Swiss-born
photographer, traversing his adopted
country and trying to make sense of it all.
The fruits of his labor, a volume of
photographs called The Americans, has
become one of the most revered photography books in history and has made its
author, Robert Frank, one of the most
influential photographers in the world.
This year marks the 50th anniversary
of the publication of The Americans, and
in celebration we lucky Americans are
being treated to the rare opportunity of
seeing the entire collection of photographs in “Looking In: Robert Frank’s
The Americans,” at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Sept. 22–Jan. 3, 2010.
“I don’t think there’s been an exhibit
of the complete series of 83 pictures
that comprise The Americans ever before
shown in New York City,” says Met photography curator Jeff Rosenheim.
The prints Met visitors will see are
significantly different from those they
might have encountered in shows during
the ’80s and ’90s. Staying as close to
Frank’s original vision as possible when
she began assembling the show five years
ago, National Gallery photography curator Sarah Greenough searched for the
earliest prints available.
“These earlier prints are much more
lush, tonally,” she says. “They create a
more poetic statement.”
Larger than later prints, the early
ones also are more tightly cropped,
focusing on the people rather than
their environments. Arranged in the
sequence Frank chose for the book,
the resonance of each photograph is
enhanced by those that precede and
follow it.
