12.6.24 — I Hear America Weeping
It would be terrible to leave you this week’s review of Robert Frank at MoMA, in collaboration and alone, without the context of his greatest work. Let me, then, offer a taste of my review from 2010 of The Americans at the Met, with a link to more. I have also written about something closer to his present show, the mayhem of Frank’s contact sheets.
In 1955 a Swiss immigrant set out to discover America. He almost found it all on a streetcar in New Orleans. 
Robert Frank chose it for the cover of The Americans, his eighty-three photographs published in this country in 1958. Trolley–New Orleans alone holds a cross-section—male and female, black and white, young and old. Its windows run parallel to the picture plane, like the cells of a contact sheet. Frank in fact winnowed the book from hundreds of rolls of film and twenty-eight thousand shots. It is an emblem of life on the road, a portrait of the artist as an American.
It is also an image of perplexity. The horizontal of that streetcar runs askew. None of the eyes or social strata make contact, with each other with or the photographer. Still others lurk in the fog of its upper windows. Within the book, the image directly follows one of a Fourth of July picnic, dominated by an American flag worn almost to transparency. For blacks on or off the streetcar, so had the American dream.
They are Americans in motion, just as the streetcar is moving past. They love cars, and they love the movies. The Met describes Hollywood here as an elite—Marx’s opium of the people. Frank will not condescend to the masses even to that extent. One really can identify the photograph of the streetcar with his art form and his art form with motion pictures. Andy Warhol, Warhol’s influence on Pop Art, and sly takes on commercial photography by Alfred Gescheidt were erupting at around the same time, and they were tracking the same upheavals.
One can see the entire book as a movie, with an enigmatic beginning and a happy ending. As it opens, two women watch a parade from separate windows. An American flag hides one woman’s face, and Frank’s point of view masks the other in darkness. Frank’s final scenes include sunbathers or drifters in a public park, and a wedding at City Hall. By the end, too, blacks get more screen time, as well as the book’s sole exchange with the photographer. A black couple turns to glare back, and young blacks in a car grin broadly.
All along, the same devices that create a distance between people also create ambiguity and humor. A black nurse holds a round-faced white infant, like a Renaissance prince. A man’s tuba obscures his face and makes a mockery of his celebration, but it also gives him a smiley. A photo booth invites people to remember their loved ones for sixty-nine cents, and maybe they will. Jack Kerouac, the beat writer, loved the free associations, like the turn from decorative stars to a starlet—as he termed it, “potry.”
Frank promised the Guggenheim that his project would be “sociological, historic, and esthetic.” He belongs at once to documentary realism and the Beats, but also to postwar formalism, escapism, and the triumph of a very American esthetic. Does that leave him in a strange middle ground, with unanswered questions about art and America? In the very last photograph, Frank steps out onto the road to shoot his wife, in the confined space of the car and at a perilous angle. Is an American journey a gesture of abandonment or of love?
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.