James May Essays
Robert Frank's "The American's": A Dawning of Self Loathing and Political Correctness
by James May
There should be a counterpoint to Robert Frank's not so casual dissemination of stereotypes of a country I know 1000 times better than Swiss transplant Frank ever did. While I greatly admire Frank's basic visual language in his famous 1959 book of documentary photographs, "The Americans"[1], I don't for one second see it as being anything other than a reflection of Frank himself and so in a certain sense having nothing to do with Americans or America. Robert Frank wouldn't be the first European from closely huddled ex-fortress towns startled by the immensity of America or by the impenetrability of what may be the most sophisticated culture ever on this earth, nor the first to profoundly misunderstand its eccentricities as weakness. The more a photographic tract purports to convey a message and the more one-sided that message is the more it verges the realm of propaganda. Writer's have portrayed and specifically contrasted the 1955 Edward Steichen curated exhibition, "The Family of Man" with Frank's "The Americans", positing "The Family of Man" exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art as nothing more than sugar coated propaganda of the wonders of the West, consigning it to the land of "Hogan's Hero's" while Frank's vision is touted as the real and gritty deal, even suggesting that "The Americans" is, at least in part, a parody of "The Family of Man"; I say that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. The reason I mention this is because Frank's groundbreaking book is frequently portrayed as some kind of dispassionate photo essay of the decadence and sadness that had overtaken America and even portrayed as a type of ethnography or anthropology, an almost Arbus-like carnival sideshow of sad and unwitting people living sad and meaningless and increasingly conformist, lonely and isolated lives which Frank himself of course rides coolly above like a full moon above scudding clouds, a somewhat lofty and perhaps even arrogant position that would become de rigueur for the rest of the 20th century when it came to the knowing documentary artist and so producing its own conformity in place of a more expansive truth. One can always be certain that when a person states with certainty something they couldn't possibly know the truth of that they are only showing what they wish to believe or think to portray and not the truth of the matter. The idea of linking Frank's work to any kind of science is the exact problem here as science attempts to ferret out the truth and is not in the business of distributing archetypes or stereotypes. There were some 160 million Americans when Frank took his famous photos and so there is an analogy to only photographing car accidents when doing an essay on American freeways. My feelings on "The Americans" are pretty simple: if one views the book as an artistic vision in the same sense as "A Streetcar Named Desire", or the film "Hud" (1961), then it is brilliant - if one views Frank's book as a vision of the essence of America in the mid-1950s then it is nothing more than childish propaganda, no more real than Norman Rockwell's paintings. The film "The Last Picture Show" (1971), has more than a passing resemblance at its heart to Robert Frank's "The Americans". Imagine if the lines between reality and art were entirely blurred and people took "The Last Picture Show" to heart as a true essence of the failure and isolation of American culture. Frank's unwitting descendants, those street photographer's who wanted to comment on American culture and make a visually unique statement at the same time found themselves addicted to the idea of America as tragedy and satire and so America became one giant cultural wreck in the lenses of America's arty photojournalist's, something to be laughed at and not celebrated but the real problem became the fact that these were real photographs and not paintings or theatrical plays wherein the boundaries of artistic vision were clearly demarcated and so set aside from reality. More within Frank's own genre, Sebastião Salgado takes photos of the dispossessed of this world. His brilliant work does not say, "This is the this culture" but, "The is a piece of this culture". Were it otherwise it would be Plato's shadow play. In a Aug., 2007 article in American Thinker by Allan Nadal titled, "Art Or Propaganda? American Postwar Photography", Nadal selectively picks 3 quotes by Luc Sante from Sante's introductory essay for an exhibition at MOMA called, "American Photography, 1890-1965": "Garry Winogrand's.... portraits of the shell-shocked and anomic society, wandering through public structures with no clear destination. "Lee Friedlander's oddly silent urban landscapes seemed like pictures of an abandoned country. "[Diane Arbus's people] were the final, conclusive products of the twentieth century, inheritors of progress, war, commerce, mass culture, and all the rest of it." One would think we were Germans or Italians photographing the post-World War II destruction and chaos prevalent in those countries rather than a successful and booming country on the verge of doing away with institutional racism. Do we as Americans really have such a gloomy vision of ourselves or is it a few famous photographers who feel this way or maybe they don't in fact feel that way but simply cannot make art without some kind of enemy as it were. Whatever is the case there is no conservatism in this arena, merely bright photographers like Sally Mann or Joel Meyerowitz or Danny Lyon who can make wonderful work without overly contextualizing it to society at large as a wasteland. We as Americans have taken a very few yet persistent visions and run very, very far with them.
Robert Frank, Parade, Hoboken, N.J. 1955 & Political Rally, Chicago, 1956 Had he wished to, Frank could just as easily have had the man behind the tuba and the people behind the flag in the window waving and smiling but then lost the art of it; it's all about what you wish to project. Frank could have photographed smiling faces skating on a frozen pond in Minnesota or at a college football game in Nebraska or office workers on break in Dallas. Let's be honest here - Frank had no desire to show happy people nor do the generations of street photographers who followed nor does the audience who admire showing the flip side of the American dream who you can bet do not see themselves in Frank's photographs. In the hands of a street photographer, an innocent picture of my sister and I sitting on the living room couch with our Halloween masks on when we were children which brings back warm memories for me takes on a darker and questioning tone; the mere fact of its presentation in an artistic context makes one believe that there must be something going on and quite innocent and even meaningless events are given a context and that context, when it comes to street photography, usually has tragic undertones. The claims of ethnography and anthropology attached to Robert Frank's book ring hollow in the face of a presentation that resembles a muted version of the 10 o'clock news with its plane crashes, murders and car accidents rather than an egalitarian survey of the American landscape of the mid-1950s. A one-sided view that admits to such is one thing and that same view passed off as reality another. In Frank's America, there is no room for the brightness of the music, literature, art and film that would captivate an entire world, or the sophistication and audacity that would place men in the Sea of Tranquility with less computer power than a cell phone. Instead there is a depiction of Americans as an underclass and with minds that are nothing more than intellectual shanty towns to bring into focus the pretence and sham of shiny things like new cars and homes. Not being an American Frank may have been entirely unaware of the commonplace story of the rise of economically humble and phenomenally unconnected individuals to great distinction and careers in America, something rather more problematic in class bound Europe and England in the mid-1950s. The tradition of recognizing American genius aside from one's origins was endemic in America in its history and a tradition well liked. Contrary to Frank's depictions of a listless and lost America, one need only read the biography of just about anyone from that era to see how fiercely energetic Americans were and are and what heady dreamers they are as well. According to the National Gallery of Art Frank's photos in "The Americans". "...reveal a profound sense of alienation, angst, and loneliness.", and a people "rendered numb by a rapidly expanding consumer culture". I don't recall any of my extended family in the mid-1960s being rendered numb in such a fashion because contrary to this notion put out by a Miss Sarah Greenough, Americans overcame not gave into such feelings by traveling huge distances in search of careers, education and opportunity thereby being the eternal outsiders but ones who put aside trepidation and learned to fit into new cultures, putting paid to the idea that they suffered from any default position of alienation, angst or loneliness - Americans were experts at overcoming or ignoring such considerations and in point of fact often embraced them. Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art gave a lecture [2]about "The Americans" titled, "Transforming Destiny Into Awareness: Robert Frank's The Americans" One could easily trade it out into saying, "Transforming Awareness Into Destiny" or "The Information Ricochet Handbook". In this lecture, Miss Greenough admits to there being "novel areas of beauty" in Frank's body of photos but this is not present in the people but in their artifacts of mid-20th century design sensibility. Miss Greenough quotes Kerouac's introduction to "The Americans", which, like Frank's dialectical sequence of photos, pair words like "sadness" and "Americaness" without a leavening of positiveness which is my point.
Robert Frank, Savannah, 1955 One need look no further to see a politically correct and patronizing example of "nostalgie de la boue" together with the new politically correct penchant for delusionally seeing what it wants to see and that is a shit version of America and that is why "The Americans" is so fully embraced by Greenough's culture; there is not anything about America that is being expressed by Miss Greenough, only her own political world view and she is guilty of further politicizing already politicized photos. In Miss Greenough's view in speaking about Frank's photo of a couple crossing a street in Savannah, a pipe (her word) becomes "knife-like" and the manner in which the woman holds onto the soldier's arm which was typical of the era was described in this way: "...his virility is clearly conveyed by the way he escorts his companion, with her hand not clasped lovingly in his but draped in the crook of his arm so that he can better direct her", a woman who by the way was fully capable of starting her own bank account at the time of the photo unlike in Frank's Europe where in Spain a woman 20 years later was still unable to do so as I mention elsewhere. How in the world it is easier to direct a woman while she lightly clasps the inside of ones elbow rather than holding her by the hand so that one could drag her should one wish to flies in the face of common sense as does the idea that this man wants to direct anyone anywhere in the first place, but politically correct entities like Miss Greenough suffer from the Orwellian delusions that accompany the act of accusing a total stranger of wanting to direct a woman against her will 55 years after the fact. The man is astonishingly even further characterized as someone who "is overweight, with fat bulging beneath his tight military garb" and as someone who "menacingly confronts the photographer" when in fact all he is doing is walking down the street with his girl towards Frank while some stranger takes a picture of him and so it is Frank who is doing the confronting and in Miss Greenough's view, a bulge of fat is immoral or decadent. The soldier seems more perplexed than anything else and for all we know he hated it when the woman held his arm like that and he may have been a Medal of Honor winner - the truth of the matter is that we don't know anything at all about this couple and reading misogyny, disintegration and menace into such a photo is only projecting our own stupidity and smug notions of superiority onto the world about us and make no mistake, in this world, misandry is something that literally does not exist; all things being equal, it must, but it does not because the new notion of equality is handed out in a fashion that is miserly and entirely one-sided. Peter Byrne in a Nov., 2009 article titled, "Never On Time: Robert Frank and the Americans", says this about the photo of the soldier and the lady: "America was between wars in 1959 and his photo of a soldier and his lady comes too late for the meager protests against the Korean War and too early for the huge antiwar movement of the mid-1960s. This soldier of Savannah, Georgia, has nothing warlike except his glare at the camera. He seems disgruntled over his duties of the day. These -- along with escorting his partner -- seem to include a courtesy visit and the delivery of a gift. He holds it gingerly in his left hand as if he has never in his life carried anything before. His pot belly rises just under the decorated box. His cigar is the only thing arrow-straight about him. He needs trousers a size larger around the waist. His lady rests her hand on his arm for help in balancing on her too narrow new shoes. Her black sheath dress appears to be walking her back the way she has come. It could be that her bobbing earrings and massive necklace impede progress. Her preparations for a day of pleasure have left her wincing with pain." In my opinion, you have to come from the seventh hell of idiocy to read such drivel into the photograph of the soldier and the woman as does Miss Greenough and Mr. Byrne. I actually feel bad for this old soldier to have such abuse heaped upon him by Miss Greenough; no wonder people don't like stranger's taking their photo on the street - who would want such nonsense read into their every innocent act? Multiply this all by 83 photos and Greenough's turgid remarks about black, white, man, woman and you have a body of work that is problematic, contextualized to the hilt. How do you think that soldier's daughter or son would feel if they were at Miss Greenough's lecture? And these are the people that talk about a nation's lack of compassion or insight when their own bigotry and lack of compassion are on full display for all to see and the more the photos are textualized and contextualized the emptier they seem and the more nonconformity is insisted upon or conformity taken for granted to have existed where it may never have is its own type of conformity since the word and accusation itself is far more complex than simple; it is natural for people to think, dress and act like their fellows and not evidence of a yolk around one's neck nor of inflexibility. In the 1950s, people who sought to be different and express that difference simply were and in those instances where they had to fight, the American court system increasingly backed them up. In 1955 there was no lack of Americans marching to the beat of their own drum - so much so in fact that Europe came to learn this trait from us if at all and not the other way around.
Robert Frank, City Fathers, Hoboken, N.J, 1955 In describing Frank's photo, "City Fathers, Hoboken, N.J.", Miss Greenough says that "the men show none of the wisdom of age, the love or concern of a parent, or even the sober stewardship of prominent civil servants" as if such things could possibly be ferreted out by looking at a person's face or skin for that matter, though Miss Greenough knows otherwise. One man appears to be blowing a kiss, which is, of course, described by Miss Greenough as a "smirk" though it just as easily could be described as playful and it could be directed towards the daughter he dearly loves or to his mistress - we do not know. By Miss Greenough's standard, one should be able to tell whether a person is a liar or a saint simply by looking at them. I am as troubled by Miss Greenough's and Mr. Byrne's depictions as I would be if they attempted to make the same connective thread to reality using "Hud" or "The Last Picture Show", films which artfully proclaim they are about disintegration while Robert Frank proclaims this American cultural disintegration to be real; feature film by its nature is obvious about its art and documentary photography often much less so. Were a feature film to blur the line between documentary and art it would be taken to task for promoting untruths and questions of ethics would arise. For some reason we are forgiving of the idea that a documentary photographer's informal yet directed agenda can amount to the same thing as a Hollywood script. For my money, anyone who claims that 1950s America at its heart was a scene of disintegration, isolation and endemic racism are simply showing what they are predisposed either by intellect, prejudice or desire to believe. When we view feature films we are hyper-aware of the artistry conveyed and its relationship to reality but with documentary photography it is a different matter entirely although they both are occupying the same space in the sense of which I am speaking. This is not analysis on the part of Miss Greenough but a hopelessly puerile, naive and biased willingness to see what one wants to see and what that is is a not so distant echo of the "sins of the West". She further seems enamored of the pedantry I associate with the wonders of dialectical contrast which is not a nuanced idea nor a specifically photographic one compared to the many layers a single photo can provide but instead merely an upgunned comic book sequence though Miss Greenough tries to compare it to film instead in a rather lifeless attempt to imbue the sequencing with a patina of art; though the presentation is more similar to a comic book's strengths than to film that comparison lacks merit in the halls of a museum - if Frank's sequences have power, so too does a sequence of comic panels. Miss Greenough says that Frank "sought not to document American life but his experience of it" and that Frank's work is not the "journey of one individual but rather the course, even the destiny of a nation.", like Frank's photos were analogues to a photo of the Union Pacific Railroad. I would argue in regard to the latter quote that Frank is doing the exact opposite and the former quote which contradicts the latter quote bewilderingly seems to agree with me. Miss Greenough seems to take it on faith that the destiny of America was to be a group of vapid consumerist's devoid of independent thought who were hypnotized by Davy Crockett on TV and their shiny washing machines while being led by endemic war mongerers, yellow journalists, misogynists and racists; we in turn can take it on faith that by an amazing coincidence Miss Greenough herself fits nowhere within that scenario. In a 2010 article Robert Moeller wrote about a photo in "The Americans", "In franks eyes, a plump African American woman wearing a simple country dress, sitting alone in a field, projects more beauty and grace than an elaborately dressed blonde starlet arriving at a movie premiere: the former radiates joy, the latter an aloof anxiety. " One sees this type of assignation of grace or brutishness, elegance or anxiety, parceled out by skin color in a startling number of instances in what is, to me, a clear case of a type of trendy and politically correct reverse racism that is just wrong. Miss Greenough herself, evidently not a fan of non-Aristotelian logic, seemingly believes that the map is indeed the territory. Frank set out with preconceived notions of places he'd never been to and photographed his distant stereotypes cemented together with first impressions and a desire to make art but stereotype as archetype doesn't make all that fitting a mortar as the former confuses and diminishes the latter if it is not readily admitted to as an internal artistic vision rather than an external reality. Frank may have misunderstood or simply disliked American eccentricity and brashness and entirely misunderstood American's as slaves to conformity since we have redefined ourselves throughout the 20th century with each new generation in a way that Europe has rarely done and the counter-culture that Europe itself embraced in the 1960s didn't originate in Europe but in the United States as did the revolutions that brought down Europe's kings and princes and so we were borrowing them a can opener as it were and Europe is today populated with American baseball caps but without a baseball stadium in sight. The American cultural landscape was all but unrecognizable only 5 years after Frank's book was published in the U.S. , a decade after the photos were taken and Robert Frank had nothing to do with it. If one wants to make a case for stodginess and conformity one need look no further than Frank's own Europe before World War II, after which, the lovely strains of a German oom pah pah quartet were drowned out by John Coltrane. To reduce 160 million Americans in the mid-1950s to intellectually listless, ardently racist and lined up on a massive escalator whisking them away to an empty consumer society is a childish notion at best. In this sense Frank's photos are nothing more than picture post cards taken by a tourist that reduce America to emptiness as Brazil is reduced to a photo of Sugarloaf or France reduced to the Eiffel Tower. I just don't get this idea that anyone in America actually thought that Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best was an actual reflection of America; they were TV shows and everybody seems to get that but the photographers who apparently bought into the idea that such shows constituted a type of propaganda. Showing America as the opposite of Father Knows Best and passing it off as reality is even stupider than the TV show itself since no one on this earth was trying to pass off Father Knows Best as reality TV and as an adjunct, I would like to say that it is just as idiotic to put a man on a pedestal by their skin color as it is to ask them to stand in a ditch because of their skin.
Robert Frank, Movie Premier - Hollywood, 1955-56 & Luc Sante writes in a Sept., 2009 essay called, "Seeing Beauty In Our Shadows", "Although no contemporaneous critic mentioned it to the best of my knowledge, Frank portrayed quite a lot of black people in his book: elegant mourners in South Carolina, a turbaned mystic bearing a cross on the bank of the Mississippi, a dashing couple of motorcyclists in Indianapolis, a very dark nurse holding a very white baby whose expression matches hers. On the whole, African-Americans come across in the book as possessing somewhat more grace and style than their white counterparts." Note Mr. Sante's own use of the words "dashing" and "elegant" and how they are consistently parceled out and withheld according to skin color in these conversations, and always by people who present themselves to be colorblind and anti-bigotry. Where does my proverbial Ohio truck driver fit into this mix and how does he fare? Not very well. Lacking in grace, elegance and turbaned spirituality evidently handed out by God in the way of high cheek bones or skin color, he resides in a no-man's land of sad and endemic bankruptcy. To me this type of general commentary is startlingly racist, startling in that it is so blithe and unaware of itself and yet at the same time seeks to preach morality to faceless millions who are in sorry need of a lesson. George Orwell warned of "doublethink" to no avail in such instances since holding mutually exclusive ideas in one's mind seems to be a feat of acrobatics which is effortless on the part of a politically correct generation of do-gooders who think everyone else does bad and tries to make us believe this based on the most shallow outside appearances of human beings while at once decrying the idea of doing so; it is a form of delusional madness. The cognoscenti love to bullshit about "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves..." but without understanding it or taking it to heart because shallow depictions of humanity is not fate or science but dump truck prejudice. In this scenario, fat equals stupid and lazy, cowboy hat equals ignorant, a turban at the Ganges precludes criminality and so on. The human condition is not predicated on wearing suits or saris or by facial features and so what you are seeing is the flip side of stereotypes trundled about in 30's pulp magazines. Crime and honesty is where you will find it and not where you expect to find it; even those wildly eccentric Bugs Bunny cartoons from the inflexible and conformist 40's are not so stupid and those cartoons and films of the era show how much Americans were aware of their own foibles and how they had no trouble seeing themselves in a humorous light - were this not so then instead of having Ben Hecht and Preston Sturges America would have had Leni Riefenstahl. In the same article Luc Sante says about Frank's depiction of America, that "the United States didn't recognize itself." To me, to blithely state that 160 million Americans lacked the ability to see themselves as a nation but that some guy from Europe who'd spent a few years in the country and who was visiting many of the locales for the first time could incisively view the real America is, in my opinion, purest nonsense. Even a comic book of all things, the April, 1953 issue of Weird Fantasy, #18 had a specifically anti-racist story in it called "Judgment Day" whose protagonist was a black man. William Gaines had to fight to get it published but make no mistake, there was a fight in progress and we needed no Robert Frank to tell us our business and so Frank's book comes more and more to seem like it was speaking to a foreign market, however much people like Miss Greenough ardently wish otherwise. Americans in 1955 were immersed in their own many layered culture that had a depth almost unrivaled in the world. The idea that one could spend a few years in a few cities in India or Brazil and then set out by car to reveal the real India or Brazil in a way that was anything but chauvinistically shallow just doesn't hold water for me and if you attach an agenda to the matter it only gets worse. If Frank was working like a painter or playwright who show their own expression of a segment of American life then that is one thing, but if "The Americans" is meant to show the "destiny of a nation" then it is a view that is hopelessly myopic and biased and somewhat mean-spirited. To me, Frank's work is brilliant in the context of art and if taken in the context of document the power of the imagery is still there but diminished; the destiny of America had nothing to do with us being clueless, racist morons with empty lives than any other nation and perhaps even less so than others; and if America, who was on the cutting edge of innovation in all walks of life in the 1950s were idiots what does that make the rest of the world and what nation in that era could have the right to look down on America from a very great height, Switzerland? Orson Wells famously said of the Swiss in "The Third Man", "...in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." If you want to read emptiness into a man's eyes then go to Cairo or India in 2010 and look into the eyes of a man riding a donkey in the suburbs of Cairo who had to give over his daughter to work for an old woman miles away because he could not afford to raise her himself or into the eyes of a farmer in India where they are committing suicide wholesale for lack of money. When it comes to the imagined superiority of the East over the decadent West, look at the filthiest and holiest Ganges River at the holy Hindu city of Varansi where Hindu's throw garbage into the river until one takes one's health into ones hands merely to enter its waters. Americans seem to have mastered the weird art of being entirely provincial about their own backyard, but viewing it as if from a great distance and that distance invariably providing a distortion in the negative and not the positive and it is important to always look at a culture in proportion and context and not in some vacuum but for all its supposed decadence, people all over the world are breaking down the doors and risking their lives to come to America like no other country in the world and in the 1950s no black folks were trying to escape America like East Germans did in their hundreds of thousands when Frank was making his photographs until the Berlin Wall had to be built and so I would like to make a book to contrast "The Americans" called, "The Rest of the World". In Miss Greenough's eyes she distributes elegance and brutishness according to a well established politically correct doctrine that is itself at once patronizing and racist and entirely unfair to her own country. To listen to a lecture composed of such utter nonsense from an institution like The National Gallery of Art is disheartening to say the least but even more disheartening in that I have come to expect it as in the eyes of the artistic elite, America seems to be nothing more than one big shithole that should be taken to task for Chapultepec and The Trail of Tears and even excoriated and punished for it as if guilt actually can be distributed by skin color. It is not just the boring conformity of Ozzie and Harriet that is to be despised here but the heart of darkness that lurked beneath the thin veneer of civilization that comprised their skin. No one can doubt that such acts as the Vietnam War comprised one enormous crime but to dismantle ourselves or flail ourselves like monks in a dark age monastery would seem to serve little purpose other than to smugly enable one to show how vociferously they do not approve and so stand above the rest of the tawdry crowd who actually like themselves which is an act apparently considered intellectually bourgeois though the lecturer's own iPhone, iPad, polluting automobile, and other veneer's of civilization are apparently exempt as long as their heart itself is in the right place and not attached to the material. There is plenty to look at with a weather eye in America from subject matter like The Pentagon, or Iraq or atomic power but when one cries wolf so often by wrapping America up in its entirety in a burlap bag and throwing it into the river it diminishes the impact.
As formal artistic expressions Robert Frank's work in "The Americans" is brilliant, particularly for its day, although Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans and others had preceded Frank in this arena, albeit in less 'beat' fashion although one could argue that William Klein and Henri Cartier-Bresson did the same kind of work before or alongside Frank. However, Frank was not just stumbling about America for months completely open to the experience and with no preconceived ideas but looking for a sense of the tragic, as happy, smiling faces have little traction in artistic expression other than to be in turn smiled at and in a larger sense Frank's book tries to turn America into one giant F.S.A. project wherein the Great Depression resides in our hearts and psyche. Making art out of a sense of the tragic is completely understandable as Shakespeare's plays would have had little traction had they been about happy picnics and Miller's "Death of A Salesman" and countless other expressions of art occupy the same space. But those expressions are art and not the wholesale condemnation of an entire national zeitgeist. They are not dispassionate snapshots of the world and the fact that Robert Frank's work uses photographs of real people in real settings in an impromptu manner has confused the issue although, arguably, Frank was working from a type of script just as Hollywood itself does. Robert Frank's photos in "The Americans" are not documentary photos except in a strict sense and resemble Jacque-Louis David's "Death of Marat" more than they do a window onto American life and like David's painting, Frank's book can be considered the photographic pieta of the revolution of the arts that had begun to look with a weather eye at America and its values. If Robert Frank and other outsiders bought into some Santa Claus notion of America that was never in fact true outside of film, literature and the media then I don't see how that is an American problem as American's surely knew themselves better than Frank did. One's reaction to a thing can be measured in this sense by what one expected to see in the first place but this should not be taken as a measure of the thing itself.
Robert Frank, 'Rodeo', 1954 In this sense Robert Frank's work in "The Americans" is not an example of a man "seeing freshly", as he claimed to want to do but work that is eminently political in its content since he had a European book deal before ever he set out; it is natural for a 'tourist' to see things through their own cultural window, we all do it, but this type of projection of our own cultural background or biases is not to be confused with truth. Frank's book of photos is formally brilliant and and yet our interpretation of it has been naive; the fact of the matter is that these themes and subjects have been with civilization all along and just because some people were unaware of this does not equal revelation - if one buys into Andy Hardy or "Leave It To Beaver" or Doris Day the chaste, one need not project this eye-popping unveiling onto society when one learns otherwise nor, as a result, depict society as if it is only sordid like a dystopian Norman Rockwell but with a camera, 83 inverted Saturday Evening Post covers spreading their own message of American life concentrated in one book; we need no epiphanies about Santa Claus and one person's visual or perceptual voyeurism or slumming in another man's matter of fact world because one person's epiphany is another's meat and potatoes. Frank's work has some of the enthusiasm of an "On the Road" wherein people are basically saying, "Oh, look - a bum, and over there, a prostitute. I've never seen that before - how weird and strange and cool. I'm going to write about it and photograph it and oh, look over there, twin girls with weird eyes."; a revelation to those who don't get out much, something less for those that do - how does one measure naiveté? Obviously Frank did get out as he traveled extensively but one gets the feeling that he viewed America from his own living room as it were, projecting his inner self onto an American landscape in a way that was entirely discordant from more complex considerations of that landscape. In this sense Frank sold his own pre-packaged provincialism and marketed it as anti-American which eventually took root because of that while William Klein's New York photos which are almost indistinguishable from Frank's work yet slightly pre-date Frank have nowhere near the reputation though arguably just as good; Klein's work was a more general artistic and academic archetype of cynicism and Frank's a cynicism posited to be specifically American. Frank was apparently startled by segregation and wanted to photograph aspects of it, like he couldn't understand why we couldn't see it like he did. It's almost like Frank was saying, "Hey, look everybody - racism, can't you see it?" Perhaps Frank was startled because he expected more from a country that touted itself as a democracy and not from Switzerland whose record during World War II was decidedly mixed when it came to the Jewish question; somewhat ironically, Frank left Switzerland because he found it a landscape empty of possibilities, potential and opportunity. I personally find it hard to credit how someone who lived in Switzerland during World War II could be so startled by segregation in the U.S. when the wholesale arrest, deportation and slaughter of Jews was an issue of everyday life in neutral Switzerland during the war - I'm afraid that's something I just don't get. Was the French book deal an issue and did Frank know it would have an anti-American slant before it was published? Did Frank object to the text because it was anti-American or because so much text took away from his photos? Unlike Walker Evans or Bresson, who managed to somehow maintain a detached distance, because they perhaps evidenced no agenda, we have confused the bright and creative artistic visions of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander with reality - if they were paintings we would be less confused as these photographers seek to control their presentations every bit as much as a painter and the disdain with which some hold Norman Rockwell's paintings of life in America are proof of this confusion and so exacerbated in the case of Frank's photos - only in the mind of an artist can it be perceptually gloomy and overcast every day; this has nothing to do with we Americans because we are not anything all the time; what Frank saw in America he could just as easily have depicted in Europe, one need only look at Brassai [5] to see so and the same could be done about any European country today if that's what you want to see; I love the story of Arthur Miller and the Egyptian policeman [6] because it speaks to this universality. Perhaps Frank resented centuries old Europe having to be rescued from its own hatreds and bigotry as it were in World War II by upstart rascals and yokels who were still in cultural short pants - I don't know. In 1982 Jno Cook writes about "The Americans", "In France it came out as a clearly anti-American book. The photographs were accompanied by an 84-page text of quotations and anecdotes collected by critic Alain Bosquet, presented under headings such as, 'The Civil War Continues,' 'Isolationism,' 'An Incorrigible Idealism,' 'Uniformity.' 'The Intellectual is Suspect,' 'Religion or Religiosity,' and 'The Almighty Dollar.'" [4] With the exception of the last it sounds like the Soviet Union, another group of upstarts who had to rescue Europe from the Eastern end. In "The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism", Phillipe Roger writes, "As Satre could have put it, in France, anti-Americanism's existence always preceded any essence of America." So, if the cart came before the horse, it may not be the greatest surprise that Frank's perhaps pre-imagined reaction to America was "somewhere between disappointment and revulsion", as Roger puts it. Frank's supposed remark about wanting to understand "the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere." takes on a slightly darker undertone of the spreading of a disease given the resultant photographs. According to Erica McDonald on her website, she recollects Robert Frank saying at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2009 that, "I felt it (the text accompanying the French 1st edition) was very anti-American". At the time Frank was taking his photos for "The Americans", those French were just at the point of being kicked out of Vietnam and Algeria after bitter fighting in their unsuccessful attempts to colonize those 2 polities. A book Frank did in those two countries called, "The French", probably wouldn't have gone over too well in Europe. Frank's book came out at a time in America in the late 1950s when people, ever more freed from drudgery and with more free time, insisted on life as art rather than getting up, going to work and doing it all over again the next day. Young people were beginning to question and even dislike American society and that dislike has never found greater traction than today; it was the cusp of the generation gap and people were testing limits and pushing back against the Hayes Office and Comic Code Authority and the violent film "Bonnie and Clyde" and the hilariously disgusting underground comic masterpieces of Robert Crumb were only a few years down the road. America was redesigning itself from the ground up, commercial illustrators with lucrative accounts in the 1950's suddenly found themselves out of work, comic books like DC had to achieve a "new look" in order to compete with their hep rivals at Marvel, old-style Hollywood directors were cast aside and TV and literature continually felt a pressure to push the envelope to keep up with the new sense America had of itself and the doubt and even dislike of America began to be highlighted by our involvement in Vietnam. In the early 1980's, Ronald Reagan ran with the idea of America simply liking itself once again but it is an idea that has never fully caught on and in fact an American loathing for itself has deepened considerably in certain circles. What had been a gradual evolution from say, 1935 to 1945 to 1955 became a wholesale deluge of change by 1965. Unlike those previous decades, the change was so abrupt and so negative in it's view of pre-Vietnam American that while many embraced it, just as many resisted and you had parallel America's existing side by side in some respects although of course the media were on the band wagon nearly from the start as it was perceived by commercial entities that this change was in fact shallow enough that it could be marketed to and that is as true today as ever as this revolution is the most televised and marketed to in history, big business from green tea to leather jackets to yoga books. Today, many of the old style designers and illustrators are recognized as masters as their work which, when viewed through the lens of the cultural revolution is startlingly good and it is realized that trends in art are not the same things as the fundamental values of art which are timeless and that perhaps we ran too far and too fast, taking with us the ephemeral and leaving behind that which mattered and in so doing created a gap that cannot be easily recrossed. One could I think, make a compelling argument that design in the United States has never recovered its voice since it was turned over in the mid-60s. In 2010 many websites have turned to retro design principles and looks and when is the last time you saw a movie poster that reflected modern design fundamentals as did mid-20th century design sensibilities; you cannot look at a movie poster from 1982 and say that it reflected a school of design? Even a sleazy detective paperback cover from 1960 reflects a more fundamental approach to design than any paperback covers from the last 40 years which are a hodgepodge of self-expression with no school of design evident. How many commercial illustrators and designers tried to keep up with the flurry of modern sensibilities in the late 1960s only to falter and fail as the whole thing was really one big crap shoot? It was a turning away for the sake of turning away and not an evolution since there was nothing to replace what was discarded, only the desire to discard; there is a difference between moving forward and moving away. Areas like science fiction and mainstream literature, film, animation all had their starts and stops in widely varying degrees, most eventually finding their own voice when recognizable sub-genres began to emerge and their principles adhered to. In the case of modern conceptualized photography, no schools of thought have emerged but merely individual self-expression, each with its own mini-world of fundamentals but with no binding principles and so each arguably as good and to be respected as the last in a vast democracy of nothing. And alongside the conceptual photographer walked the view that America was still a thing to be discarded and entirely politicized and all in one direction with no balance evident or desired for that matter and so the creative became merely a tiresome blog whose only binding principle was that America was an imperfect place which needed to be eternally torn down and rebuilt. The principle was "I'm okay, you're okay." within this community and with America outside that community generally speaking it was, "You're not okay." To me, this is simply dishonest. Success and failure has come to be associated with one's politics and not with a situation where there is actual scope for failure and, as I state elsewhere, there can therefore be no success. Agenda driven art is not art but propaganda and a political position is not talent. If all modern artist's do is smash idols then that itself becomes inflexible conformity. The modern iconoclast has become the new John Wayne, but one who is very good at networking and coffee drinking.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, I must admit that as a photographer myself I look with a weather eye at a book of 83 photographs like "The Americans" that took some 28,000 photos to comprise; perhaps not exactly going for the jugular when it comes to a personal vision in taking the photos but very much so in the process of editing them. Robert Frank should not be taken to task for his artistic expression which should be and has been celebrated, but in the sense a play is celebrated and not as a reflection of reality; "A Streetcar Named Desire" would have an utterly different tone were it not only trumpeted as being based on a true story but that story being the essence of a hopeless and hapless America. Rather, it is ourselves who should be taken to task for running with the idea that we are dark, racist and clueless morons; it is only in someone's head that a single person depicted in "The Americans" had dead end lives or that a cowboy chewed on his cigar "brutishly". Let's face the truth, in Frank's book a black man has an aura of jazzy innocence and a cowboy hat an instant association with brutishness and my own association with such concepts is one of idiocy. As for Frank himself, it is hard to understand a person feeling so strongly about the decadence of America when he himself had escaped immolation only a few years before by having the luck as a Jew to live in neutral Switzerland during World War II and it was those self-same "Americans", decadent dead end kids, "marching morons" [7] or otherwise, who liberated many a concentration camp. What traction does the tail end of the Jim Crow era depicted in some few of Frank's photographs have compared to the mass murder of 6 million Jews only a few years before and that's not including the brutal war on the Russian front that swallowed millions more lives, acts that have never been seen on the American continents on such a monumental scale; Frank loves to depict Americans as leading lives with blinders on but one has to question who it was who had on the blinders and towards what since Spain, for example, even years after "The Americans" came out, was a place where a woman couldn't start a bank account without her husbands permission and in the middle east at the end of the first decade of the 21st century women reside in a similar place; who's knocking down the doors to make a book called "The Muslims" and how excoriated would it be if it occupied the same intellectual space as Frank's "The Americans" and with similar chapter headings to the French first edition? When art becomes confused with reality and that reality depicts the decadence of another culture, that art becomes a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. For all its decadence, Frank has continued to live in the United States as an "American", and not Europe. When one thinks of how the American flag is used in "The Americans", it may be that Frank's own perceived near miss in Switzerland during World War II and that war's attendant devastation had simply given Frank a deep distrust of the uses to which flags could be put. In an interview at Wellesley College in 1977 Robert Frank said about his work in "The Americans", "I knew the photographs were true. They were what I felt, they were completely intuitive. There was no thinking. That feeling has stayed with me; I never wavered from that. When I did 'The Americans' I was very ambitious, I knew I wanted to do a book, and I was deadly serious about it, and somehow things just happened right. It was the first time I had seen this country, and it was the right mood. I had the right influences - I knew Walker's photographs, I knew what I didn't want, and then that whole enormous country sort of coming against my eyes. It was a tremendous experience, and it worked, but it came naturally to show what I felt, seeing those faces, those people, the kind of hidden violence. The country at that time - the McCarthy period - I felt it very strongly." There should not be modern portraits taken in India or Guatemala with a politically correct caption saying how much pride or spirituality the face reflects since pride and spirituality are endemic to us all, as are elegance and brutishness - it is nothing more than happy and well-intentioned racism to do so - at least if you believe, as I do, that racism is a language and not an expression of power. Being all human is our legacy and the market has not been cornered by anyone - this is real perception. Such comments as I have characterized are patronizing towards people in the Third World and insulting towards the West; it's almost a form of casual and patronizing racism because it holds that peoples in the Third World are different from ourselves in a way that needs some kind of propping up or special attention with footnotes. I am surprised by how many times I have seen the word "dignity" attached to Frank's photo of black men in "Funeral, St. Helena, S.C., 1955"; in my opinion this is a more subtle and nuanced form of racism, ostensibly positive but racism nonetheless since people of color are still held to be some other and such positive appellations are conspicuously absent from descriptions of the white middle class. At the 50th anniversary celebration of "The Americans " at the Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater Robert Frank, when asked by Charlie LeDuff why he photographed so many minorities for his book, Frank replied, "They looked more attractive than white people." At that same event and wearing a John Deere baseball cap, Frank said, "People here have a largesse. I'm grateful to have become an American." It is a commonly held view among Western documentary photographers that dignity, spiritualism and value resides everywhere but in their own culture and they delight in showing the debauchery and emptiness of the West. This is a form of subtle yet nevertheless brutal cultural self-loathing as the story of America and our parents and grandparents has never been disliked by more Americans than today as 50's symbolism gave way to urban myth gave way to a reality which was taken for granted. This is an echo of the 1960's when a young generation couldn't wait to flee both physically and intellectually away from their parents, accenting and accelerating and twisting with a passion the natural desire to get out on one's own and start a life and family. The American Frank-mirrored penchant of portrayal of other cultures in this manner is natural to a certain extent because people are fascinated by other cultures, but there is no need to wallow in politicizing and formalizing one's ignorance of others in the name of professing a desire to learn or to peer beneath the veil. In such a case, all those photographers are documenting is their own incomprehension and parochialism. In any case, you will not see such spiritual captions, talk about high cheekbones and "Nostalgie de la boue"[9] beneath the portrait of an Ohio truck driver or a banker and you can be assured of that. Often the closer we photographers are to a thing the less we see it and so we fight to do so rather than relax. Photographers are of course aware of this but still too often succumb to the very banality they seek to "see freshly" and so go hunting in other localities armed for bear, and with sad notions that distribute morality and wisdom by skin color and clothes.. As I state elsewhere, Frank is not to be blamed for his vision of America but ourselves for running with it alongside Burroughs and the misunderstood legacy of Kerouac and others of their ilk, outsiders who, like fine art photographers who perhaps cannot climb to a good place, seek to tear it down to their own level, and so you have the wholesale gutting of sectors of fine art photography in America alongside the idea of America itself as there are now large sectors of the American public who have a vested and childish interest in viewing mainstream America as spiritless and sinful. Robert Frank was making politically correct depictions of decrepit American institutions long before that term came into resonance. The coming decades in America would see an obsession on the political Left with a friendly version of ethnic cleansing - multiculturalism and diversity, as if that decrepit European America needed a leavening to wash away its endemic sinfulness. The currency such ideas still have today was nowhere more evident than in Barak Obama's run to the Presidency on a platform of fundamental changes that America needed to embrace before it could wash away the sins of its own past. In liberal arts colleges across this nation in the 1970s Robert Frank's "The Americans" found great favor among both teachers and students as it jibed almost perfectly with the counter-culture's own ideas of the failed American zeitgeist that came to its most obvious expression in the 1950s. In fact, the two American decades following World War II were rejected wholesale as artless, spiritless and rigidly conformist. Mr. Byrne's and Miss Greenough's remarks quoted earlier show the truth of this entire scenario as they are merely the tip of an iceberg in an America where their political breed huddle closely together on issues ranging from immigration to affirmative action to taxation to global warming. Dissent in this community is treated with derision and it is notable how many contemporary artist's statements include the idea of art as a vehicle of social change. While this is nothing new, there is a stridency and hollowness about today's artistic crusaders that tells me that it is not a desire for social change which resides at the heart of this phenonenon but a trendy, stereotype and buzz-word ridden "huddling place" in which the intellectual and anti-American inheritors of a European's unkind view of America practice their own unwitting conformity. Many of today's fine art photographers who tout their work as vehicles for change run perilously close to appearing as people who simply tell others what they think they want to hear in order to tap into this anti-self currency the better to get exhibitions and grants from institutions whose own rhetoric is now laced with a heavy hand of social programs for anyone considered disenfranchised. In this commisar-like scenario the stars are women, gays and ethnicity and those who are looked at with a weather eye are men, those of European descent and pretty much anyone who doesn't give off with a hearty equivalent to the term "comrade". In order to be on the right side of this equation people like Byrne and Greenough show off their credentials as if to say, "I belong"; let's be honest, to do otherwise would be career suicide. Large sectors of American art institutions have become willing promoters and enablers of a type of intellectual affirmative action whose views of those they see as equal but in the past disenfranchised are nevertheless patronizing portraits of second class citizens, as if they themselves doubt what they promote. America is being transformed into a place where the least among it citizens is to be given full expression no matter the cost in treasure or culture and no matter how many props have to be built to sustain the structure and no matter how many others are discomfitted to avoid the impropriety of inequality. It is not an artist's world but that of a lawyer covering all the bases who doesn't understand that the term "all men are created equal" has to do with kings and princes and their divine right to rule and nothing about the rights of common men one to the other or cultural relativism. The politicization of the art world in America is far advanced and a true reflection of Frank's book, aside from its actual influence, but in an Orwellian manner that is so troubling that it is the arts themselves that have largely come to occupy the conceptual and political space of "The Americans" depicted in Frank's book, and the art of it, the art of creativity, has been lost for the politics of it, subverted, twisted and circumvented. Notes 1. Robert Frank, The Americans (New York: Grove Press, 1959). |
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