The big picture: America as seen by Robert Frank

It’s a common urge to want to go back in time and see or hear a once revolutionary, now iconic work of art as it looked or sounded before it was assimilated into the tradition it appeared to assault. In the case of The Americans by Robert Frank (who died last week, aged 94) this is surprisingly simple. All you have to do is look at the pictures. Even now, more than 60 years later, many of the pictures in the most influential photography book of the postwar period remain hard to fathom. Several of them were shot through windows, but prior ideas of framing and focus had been thrown out of the window.

The irony is that the person who had defined what American photographs should look like, Walker Evans, was one of Frank’s supporters; he recommended him for the Guggenheim fellowship that financed the road trip during which Frank took the thousands of images later edited down to the 83 printed in The Americans.

The book’s inarticulate power to unsettle was nicely articulated by Diane Arbus in 1971: “There’s… a kind of hollowness in his work. I don’t mean hollow like meaningless… I mean his pictures always involve a kind of non-drama… a drama in which the centre is removed. There’s a kind of question mark at the hollow centre of the sort of storm of them, a curious existential kind of awe, it hit a whole generation of photographers terribly hard, like they’d never seen that before.”

One of these photographers was Arbus’s friend Garry Winogrand, who felt compelled to follow Frank’s example and document his own journey across America. This picture exercised a particular fascination for him and it’s easy (in the sense, also, of rather difficult) to see why. What made Frank choose this moment – a moment that isn’t even a moment? What makes it a picture? What’s it a picture of exactly? The photographs in The Americans ask these questions so insistently – in an almost inaudible mumble – that we continue to lean forward, attending to them more closely.