Robert Frank's The Americans: Art, Reception, and Legacy
This essay examines Robert Frank's landmark 1958 photography collection, The Americans, analyzing the hostile critical reception it initially received in the United States and the artistic innovations that explain both its controversy and its enduring influence. The paper traces Frank's relationship to his mentor Walker Evans, contrasts their respective photographic philosophies, and offers a close reading of Frank's "Elevator — Miami Beach, 1955" to illustrate how Frank's raw, immediate style achieves a distinctive empathy. The essay also situates Frank's contribution within a broader shift in American photography, comparing his work to that of contemporaries such as Diane Arbus.
- Introduction: A Hostile Reception: Frank's celebrated work met fierce early criticism
- Frank, Evans, and the Classical Standard: Frank departs from Evans's classical photographic style
- Close Reading: 'Elevator — Miami Beach, 1955': Raw framing conveys subject's perspective and dignity
- Legacy and the Liberation of American Photography: Frank's methods freed photography into modernism
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper opens with a compelling paradox — a photographer now celebrated as the world's pre-eminent living photographer who was initially savaged by critics — immediately giving the reader a reason to keep reading.
- The close reading of "Elevator — Miami Beach, 1955" grounds abstract claims about style and empathy in a specific, concrete example, making the argument persuasive and accessible.
- The comparison between Frank, Evans, and Arbus efficiently maps the broader photographic landscape without digressing from the central argument.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper models effective use of contrast as an analytical tool. By consistently juxtaposing Frank's raw, immediate style against Walker Evans's carefully composed classicism, the author clarifies what is genuinely innovative about Frank's approach. This technique — defining a subject's significance against a known reference point — is particularly useful in arts and humanities writing.
Structure breakdown
The essay moves logically from context (the hostile reception) to cause (stylistic divergence from Evans) to evidence (close reading of a specific photograph) to broader significance (Frank's legacy and influence on modern photography). This four-part arc — problem, background, analysis, significance — is a reliable and replicable structure for short analytical essays in the humanities.
Introduction: A Hostile Reception
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 1958 compilation 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 described 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). This immensely negative initial reception is all the stranger given that Frank could be referred to in the New York Times in 2015 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 provoked such a strongly negative reaction at first.
Frank, Evans, and the Classical Standard
Perhaps the simplest clue to the poor reception of The Americans in the late 1950s can be found in Frank's own artistic genealogy. Frank was a protégé of the legendary American photographer Walker Evans, and The Americans was funded by a Guggenheim Foundation grant that Frank received primarily because of Evans's patronage. Evans's own work represented the accepted artistic standard of American photography: carefully framed, composed, and 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's 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 dignity that poverty might be thought to deny them, and there was a leftist political purpose behind his carefully composed, clear photographs. Frank, by contrast, aims for immediacy and reality, often at the expense 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.
References
Dawidoff, N. (2015, July 2). The man who saw America: Looking back with Robert Frank, the most influential photographer alive. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/magazine/robert-franks-america.html
Lane, A. (2009, September 14). Road show: The journey of Robert Frank's 'The Americans'. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/14/road-show
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