The Americans Hardcover – May 15, 2008

Like an elusive text in search of itself, Robert Frank's 1958 book The Americans has changed format each of the four times it's changed publishers. From the text heavy French version to the oversized aperture reprint, Frank has continued to refine his work each time it appears in print.In the Scalo version, the place-name captions have been removed from the pages opposite the photographs and collected in the back of the book. Forget any ideas you might have of Frank's book being a travelogue. In place of the itinerary, the Scalo edition finally establishes the ORDER of the book's photographs as the crucial ingredient in Frank's complex vision of America. The 83-photograph sequence cuts between elliptical narrative of the open road and comparative sociology of dead-end lives as Frank turns free association into inescapable logic and then back again. The result is the most masterful combination of photographs in book form.The subjects of Frank's photographs roam this fractured typology like prophets locked in an unstable time loop. Geography no longer takes center stage as the formative element of their photographic selves. In some small but significant way, the americans in the Scalo edition reclaim the intentionality of their sadness, anger, and alienation. The bitter and often unwilling nature of their engagements with Frank take center stage, each as profound an act of refusal as Frank's own denunciation of the pasteboard optimism of '50s America.

If you want to understand the USA of today, 2009, there's no better time and place to start than with America in the mid 1950s, when the "post-war-cold-war-post-cold-war" culture first took shape, at the threshold of: rock and roll and youth culture; clvil rights, the end of Jim Crow, 'crossover' culture; global immigration, the culture of diversity; college as a normal expectation for lower-middle class kids; the Beat Generation, Hippies, the turn-on-drop-out culture; two kids, two income families, two cars in every garage, and above all a TV in every home. You'd have been quite a prophet if you'd foreseen 'what we are today' on the basis of 'what we were in 1950,' but the seeds were there.If you want to 'see' the 1950s, you can do it. You don't need a time-machine. The 85 photographs in this famous collection, taken 'on the road' by the German-Swiss Robert Frank, are worth at least 85,000 words. All in black-and-white, eclectic and experimental in darkroom technology, almost none of them of 'famous' people or familiar sights, these carefully and thoughtfully sequenced photographs reveal more of the shadows upon the American Dream than the sparkling spot lights, but they are as uncompromisingly honest as a dental X-ray. Not a speck of caries can be hidden. Frank saw through the superficial smiles of the 1950s to the cavities of core city and rural poverty, racism, sexism, crassness, and forced conformity - the grotesque 1950s that Flannery O'Connor depicted in Wise Blood and other works, that James Dean and Marlon Brando portrayed in films, and that Jack Kerouac tried to flee by taking to "the road."If you want to understand Kerouac - or the appeal of Kerouac to a generation of young Americans - you couldn't do better than spend some hours looking at these photos of the culture he fled from. And in fact, Kerouac himself played a role in getting Frank's work recognized and published. The introduction to the first edition of The Americans is possibly Kerouac's most intelligent and coherent piece of social analysis, almost a manifesto of dissatisfaction with the stifling mediocrity of his contemporary USA.Robert Frank was above all a photographer. A camera artist. The compositional and technical innovations that he achieved in this and other thematic collections of photos nudged the aesthetic of photography in directions that are still evident even in commercials during football games or in fashion shots for auto ads. The huge touring exhibit of his work, now on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has reminded me of his powerful impact both as a visual artist and as a social commentator. Don't miss it if you have a chance!

Old analogue film photos tell me those old day’s ambitions for photography.I miss those pure b&w tones of old days that strictly shows the esprit of objects.I like even though worn out cover and pages of the book that showing the times that passed by.Thanks to Robert Frank, and Steidl the publisher, and unknown book seller in Amazon. They all gave me good enough precious moments to taste Art in my Lifetime.I appreciate and hope they all get blessed.J.O,Kim

Brilliant and important photo book... Great captures in that time of US history.

Antes de comprar este libro, recomiendo investigar sobre esta obra de Robert Frank. Es vital entender de qué se trata para no llevarse una sorpresa desagradable. Somos muchos los que despreciamos estas fotos de Frank hasta que entendimos de qué va The Americans.Es muy expresivo y personal. Las fotografías pueden parecer obras individuales, pero hay conexiones entre ellas y no es difícil encontrarlas.Es un gran libro porque cambió la forma de hacer en la fotografía documental.