Taking a sharp look and photographing things “just as they are” were Frank’s primary goals for the project, and his high standards came in handy for the epic task of choosing which photos to include in the book. From 10,000 miles and 767 rolls of film, Frank made 1,000 work prints and then cut that number down to just 83. Among these Americans were the starlets and socialites, cowboys and drag queens, crowded elevators and lonesome highways that formed the fabric of 1950s America.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t necessarily the America people wanted to see. Frank tried to get his book published in the U.S., but it was Frenchman Robert Delpire who signed on for the job. Pleased to see it in print but disappointed with the heavily captioned version that Delpire demanded, Frank continued to look for an American publisher that would allow his pictures to stand alone. In 1959, Grove Press published The Americans with minimal captioning and a simple foreword by Jack Kerouac. It was met with critical disdain.

“There he is, out there photographing what’s really going on in America, what is lurking beneath the surface, which is a terrible sense of malaise and disharmonies of all variety, between youth and age, rich and poor, and black and white,” says the Met’s Rosenheim. “The critics could not handle the truth, both stylistically and documentarily.”

In the end, however, Frank has had the last laugh. “What the critics say is not as important as a book that will survive,” he told Greenough.

Though both Greenough and Rosenheim decline to choose a favorite photo among The Americans, Frank openly states that his choice is the shot of a couple sitting on a hill in San Francisco. It’s an interesting pick for a photographer renowned for his stealth, because— from their defiant stare—we know that these two have caught him in the act.

“It’s the invasion that the photographer has when he takes the picture, the invasion of their private lives,” Frank told Greenough, in an effort to explain what he sees in this particular shot.

In the end, it seems that even the photographer who captured America with what Jack Kerouac called “the strange secrecy of a shadow” enjoys emerging from the shadows now and again.

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