Back in the American dream days of 1955, a young Swiss immigrant named Robert Frank took a used Ford and a Leica and the proceeds of a Guggenheim fellowship and set off on a two-year trip down the wild highways of this country. He took a lot of photographs and made a book out of them which was published in 1959 with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. The book was called The American and a lot of people didn’t like it.
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And what he saw: the people no one else was looking at–the invisible people, the blacks and Mexicans and Indians and neglected young and forgotten old and poor white from the mountains, all eating and sleeping and hustling and making their way in this great country as best they could.
He photographed a coffee shop in Indianapolis and a men’s room in Memphis and a bunch of hot-blooded kids in bathing suits making out in a park in Ann Arbor–all bare legs on blankets, their cars two-toned, chrome-mouthed monsters parked in a herd around them. He got those lighted glass cases with the pies and doughnuts in the restaurants, the little round fans humming on top, and the glow of the jukeboxes, and a picture of leather chairs in a Houston bank that are emblems for that city today as they were then–gleaming leather chairs, decadent and empty. He got the factory workers in Detroit and the Miami Beach matron and streets and starlets and macho men out west (feet planted apart, hands in pockets, saying love me, love me though they dont know it). And everywhere, the Stars and Stripes us looking at ourselves right through them to remind us of who we are.
