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.
In a documentary in which he discusses his work, Frank says: “You can find that the most interesting thing is always people.” And it’s true: each of his photographs seems placed at the center of the personal history of the person pictured, as if he captured echoes from the past and warned of what was to come. Hard, ordinary lives, with everyday worries and small pleasures. But The Americans also includes several images in which no one appears. Three crosses in the middle of nowhere, a long stretch of road at night, a car wrapped in a tarp between two palm trees, a gas station, a shop window in Washington. These are photographs that capture the pulse of life back then—and who knows, perhaps of life today, or of life as it has always been: the ever-present threat of death, the longing for a little comfort, the flight to conquer a world that slips away, loneliness, and the fleeting brilliance of things.
It makes sense that it was the great writer of the Beat Generation who wrote the introduction to a book by a Swiss photographer who set out to explore his country in order to get to know it thoroughly. There is a moment in On the Road, the novel Kerouac published around the same time, in 1957, where one of the characters refers to those familiar images that Americans took of themselves back then — and that their children would later see — which depict “smooth, orderly lives, neatly framed by the photographs,” the lives of those who get up “every morning to walk proudly along the sidewalks of life.”
Kerouac then notes: “Our children could never imagine the ragged madness and turmoil of our real lives, of our real night, of the hell locked within it, of the path of senseless nightmare. The whole interior was nothing but emptiness without beginning or end.” It’s not hard to relate to those Americans of the 1950s — they’re part of a shared past, and it’s a European who portrays them. A “path of senseless nightmare,” says Kerouac. What would he say now about what people are going through — people who don’t recognize themselves in the ridiculous fable of splendor and glory that Donald Trump has invented for his compatriots?
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