Robert Frank, U.S. 285, New Mexico (1955) © Robert Frank, from The Americans |
In 1955, the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, then a slightly disillusioned thirty-one-year-old expat living in New York City, bought a used Ford coupe and took to the highways in search of the real America. With letters of reference from the artist Walker Evans, the photographer and curator Edward Steichen, and the Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, Frank received a Guggenheim Fellowship and later a second Guggenheim which gave him the freedom to explore what was then uncharted territory. Frank wrote on his Guggenheim application that he sought to portray Americans as they live at present: “Their every day and their Sunday, their realism and dream. The look of their cities, towns and highways.” Four years later Frank’s 10,000 mile road trip culminated in The Americans, a book that changed the course of twentieth-century photography.
First published in France in November 1958, Les Americains received little attention. Robert Delpire had agreed to publish Frank’s work as part of an educational series, rather than as an artist’s book. To Frank’s dismay, his photographs were reproduced on right-hand pages facing text excerpts—Alexis de Tocqueville, Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Wright, and other critics of the United States. Then Les Americains caught the eye of Barney Rosset of Grove Press, who had just published D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, previously banned in the United States. In