¶ … Robert Frank is now recognized as one of the most important and influential American photographers of the twentieth century, but this recognition was hardly immediate. Frank's most important work, the compilation from 1958 entitled The Americans, could not find an American publisher initially and debuted in France. Published in America a year later, it was received with hostility: a review in Popular Photography would describe the photographs as "warped" and "wart-covered," declaring them "images of hate" (Dawidoff 2015). Other negative reviews described the book as "a slashing and bitter attack on some U.S. institutions," "a degradation of a nation," and "a sad poem for sick people" (Lane 2009). The immensely negative initial reception is even stranger when Frank in 2015 can be referred to in the New York Times as "the world's pre-eminent living photographer" (Dawidoff 2015). It is worth inquiring more closely what Frank's artistic achievement was in The Americans, and why it should have provoked such a strongly negative reaction initially.
Perhaps the simplest clue to the poor reception of The Americans in the late 1950s can be seen through Frank's own artistic genealogy. Frank was a protege of the legendary American photographer Walker Evans, and The Americans...
Evans' own work represented the accepted artistic standard of American photography: carefully framed, composed, focused images, such as those from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his best-known work, a travelogue recording rural poverty in the South during the Great Depression. The Americans follows the travelogue format of Evans' masterpiece, but the photographic style is wholly different. In some sense, Evans felt the need to humanize and elevate his impoverished subjects: the camera lent them a grandeur and a dignity that poverty might be thought to deny them, and there was a sort of leftist political purpose behind his carefully composed and clear photographs. Frank, by contrast, aims for immediacy and reality, often to the detriment of these "classical" elements of photographic composition. Frank's photography is the sort that can be called "gritty" or "raw" in a praiseworthy way -- but in the late 1950s, grit and rawness were not considered praiseworthy elements of a photograph. Instead they merely seemed amateurish.
We can see both the merit and the lasting influence of Frank's methods, however, in a photograph like "Elevator -- Miami…
