By Brett Warnke
“The 50s,” that grey and cozy period of postwar life actually included most of “the 60s” as well. It is a period our contemporary society has been obsessed with since the convulsion of 1968. “It wasn’t that great!” cry the social critics and artists. Films and novels like Revolutionary Road, The Hours, School Ties, Dead Poets Society, Driving Miss Daisy, and Pleasantville are just a toe-dip into the sea of tales hoping to deconstruct “the 50s” myth. Therefore, it is not unlikely that today’s Met Museum patrons viewing Robert Frank’s The Americans will squeal with enjoyment at the off-center, peeling photography of an early mythbuster.
The Swiss-born Frank captured America from 1955-1957 through the use of a Guggenheim grant. He snapped over 28,000 images en route while later whittling his collection down to 83 eerie, pregnant, and provocative photographs. These provide the visual testimony of journeys as far north as Butte, Montana and as far south as Miami Florida.
His motifs are easy to spot: Cars, entertainment, and roads—so many roads—stretching inexorably through the coarse plate lands of the west. In these photographs American vehicles are possessions of necessity where hidden lovers neck, workers roll, and families ride. Jack Keruoac, the road poet himself, penned the jazzy introduction to the book. His phrases are peppered throughout the exhibit.
Interestingly, Frank captures quiet subcultures that seem too early and out of place for “the 50s.” Rodeos in Detroit? Black male trannies in public? A cowboy in New York City? He travels to venues of action. There are funerals, parades, crowded streets, trolley stops, and rallies. Again and again the viewer is faced with the faceless. A globular tuba stares like a Cyclops, but the player’s head is obstructed. An elderly figure ghoulishly stands beneath the stairs—again no face. On a red carpet, a platinum haired starlet is blurred out—her face a fog—while Frank artfully highlights a scoop of her adoring crowd; these are the faces to see. And perhaps most symbolically, a strained flag shows one parade goers patriotism and another’s anonymity as it flaps across a window, hiding faces.
I might even characterize his images as “Hopperesque” since Edward Hopper, too, illustrated the isolated. A friend of mine once wrote a poem observing “only statues and cynics are alone in a crowd.” But in Frank’s pictures there is a consuming emptiness in the crowd itself. Two truckers stare blankly ahead—prisoners of the road. In another, the elderly sit crowded on a bench, their rubbery noses point in independent directions like a multi-fingered road sign. You even see the birth pangs of our consumer society as bored waitresses and elevator operators roll deadened eyes at the camera. Buttressing this isolation is America’s racial reef, nicely depicted in a shot of a New Orleans trolleycar. A solitary black man gazes at the camera from his rear seat. Legally segregated, he’s not even fit to sit beside an adjacent white child.
But Frank’s most famous and enduring images capture the frenzy of American society and its worship of the shiny, the new, the young, and the corrupt. I especially enjoy the arty partiers at MoMA sipping bubbly—perhaps a disapproving jab at the lefties who will later worship his work?
De Tocqueville pointed out that “The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.” Frank removes the varnished layer, starkly positioning photos of poverty beside the vim and radiance of America’s upper class at play. There is American freedom in these photographs, but it is a freedom to conspicuously consume at others expense. In photo 24 a child crawls alone on a dusty floor while photo 25 captures a diamond-dusted diva in a hotel lobby. It is a contrast that never falters because it portrays a truth that never sticks. A blighted Nebraska farm—its only lifeline to the outside world is a narrow mail slot—is placed in juxtaposition with a busty high-roller who whirls dice in a Reno honk-y tonk. These are the contrasts that make America play on.
But where is suburbia? In the flight of “the 50s”, the suburbanization of America had begun. And also, where is religion? True, there is one image of a wanderer on a Delta pilgrimage, but it does little justice to the religious rivers of America’s interior. In our age of rising populism one image haunts me still. A 1956 photo titled “Political Rally” shows a rouser above a crowd waving his fists like he’s fighting bees. His face is a terrifying grimace, reminiscent of any snake-handling Congregationist, or more chillingly, any podium-pounding fascist. And the crowds listen.
Robert Frank’s photos are prescient because they illustrate what we now plainly see: the rusty frame of America’s gleaming Studebaker. The portrait of an absurd, bleak, and cruelly stratified America seems the warning shot in an era of good feelings. Frank’s Americans endures because the inequities and attitudes he portrays are entirely relevant today. Frank peered into the mystery of America and in Keruoac’s words, “sucked a sad poem” right out of it. Perhaps, in foolish hope, we should remember that other great European traveler who wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”
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