The Second Coming of The Americans

In the mid-1950's Robert Frank won a Guggenheim grant to travel the United States and document what he observed through photography. When the resulting book, The Americans, was first published in the United States in 1959 it was widely criticized, even reviled, for presenting a bleak, unflattering portrait of the nation. I was not aware of this as a child in the late 1960's when, for the first of innumerable times, I pored over my father's paperback copy. The images I saw then were compelling to me because they seemed to explain the social unrest that, it turns out, was simmering at the time he was taking them and would come to a full boil in the coming decade and which I heard so much about at home. For example, one of the most famous photographs from the book shows four bus passengers, each seated at a window; a white lady and a white boy are in the front two seats, behind them are a black man and a black woman. Frank took this picture just days after he was arrested in Mississippi and spent the night in jail, apparently for no other reason than he was a foreigner. A few weeks later, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to sit in the back of the bus.

Today I spent much of my morning in the Metropolitan Museum exhibit devoted to Frank's The Americans. The occasion for the exhibit is the 50th anniversary of the book's publication. The occasion for my trip to the Met was a field trip for a class I teach, Shapers of the World. After setting my students loose in the Greek and Roman gallery to sketch and then embark on self-directed exploration of the museum, I self-directed myself over to the Frank exhibit. There I renewed my experience of revelation: seeing all 83 images, most original prints for use in the first edition, in sequence was powerful. In addition, the curation of the show was simple, direct, and helpful. Most fascinating, perhaps, was Frank's letter of application for the Guggenheim grant: a simple two-page statement of intent of refreshing eloquence and clarity of purpose (in the end he accomplished exactly what he proposed to do). In the letter he discusses the fact that he is a foreigner (Frank is Swiss-born and immigrated to the US as a young man), proposing that this will enable him to document the country from a perspective not available to Americans. I can relate to this as I feel much more attuned to what I am observing when I am abroad than when I am at home. No doubt, Frank's outsider viewpoint shaped the images that were initially met with hostility by much of the US public, yet it also proved more honest than its critics could admit and more enduring than they ever would have imagined.

Fittingly, in my Shapers class we just studied Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which describes society as essentially a safe haven of illusion. Only intrepid souls venture out of the cave and try to report back that the shadows on the walls of the cave are not real; however, their news is met with hostility. Plato believed that philosophers were those who sought to bring the light into the cave. My students did projects on who may be playing that part in today's society. While the topic is fresh in their minds, I will tell them about Robert Frank and show them The Americans.