Capturing America’s Psyche : A Survey of Robert Frank’s Photos Explores U.S. Life

Right now, Robert Frank’s extraordinary photographs are ubiquitous in Southern California. If ever there was an opportunity to get to know the brilliant work of the 71-year-old Swiss-born American artist--whose haunting photographic survey of our national life in the midst of the seemingly self-satisfied Eisenhower era stands as a turning point for photography and for America’s self-perception--this is it.

Frank’s photographs are currently featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art along with those of 10 other artists in an exhibition called “Social Documents: MOCA’s New Photography Collection.” They also form the stunning crescendo of “Points of Entry: Reframing America,” a provocative exploration of immigrant photography on view through Sunday at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts. And most important, they are the singular subject of “Robert Frank: Moving Out,” a not-to-be-missed, 50-year retrospective that opened Saturday at the Lannan Foundation. There, Frank is irreversibly established as one of the greatest visual poets of our time.

The retrospective shows that he was great almost right out of the gate. Apprenticed to a commercial photographer in Zurich at 16, Frank was making exceptional photographs by the time he first went to New York in 1947 at 22.

“Central Park South,” made the following year, shows an ethereal tall building reflected in an oily street puddle beneath the wheels of two parked cars. Looking down into life’s margins to see reflections of our highest aspirations would become something of a hallmark of Frank’s art.

Indeed, his work regularly reverses the typical polarity expected of photography. Rather than exploit the camera’s presumed capacity for automatically bringing an audience closer to the subject in the picture, Frank’s photographs instead seem to record estrangement. His work creates distance, a subtle separation from the ordinary, which returns a vivifying sense of unknowable mystery to life’s routines. Empathetic intimacy surrounds the experience of his art.

Sometimes a complex narrative is implied. Working in London in 1952 and 1953, he made harrowingly beautiful images of a nation still reeling from wartime trauma. They echo that tragedy, while also speaking of an inescapable sense of existential loss.

In one, a small child runs away at the left, along the old sidewalk of a bleak residential street, while the right foreground is dominated by an imposing black hearse. Neatly framed by the window of the hearse’s open back door, a small background figure of a street sweeper is seen pushing his dustbin. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and fleeing changes nothing.

A photograph like this would be unthinkable without the growing prominence of the picture press in the 1940s and 1950s--not because Frank’s work remotely resembles the documentary narratives that would be found in Life magazine, but precisely because it doesn’t. Frank had worked as a photojournalist in New York for Harper’s and Junior Bazaar; he knew how to make commercially acceptable photographs. But with increasing rigor he used those skills to work against the prevailing grain.

The pinnacle of that approach was “The Americans” (1955-56), the once reviled, now revered “visual study of a civilization,” as Frank described the proposed photographic survey of the United States on a successful grant application to the Guggenheim Foundation. The 83 pictures, chosen from more than 600 rolls of film shot over nearly two years of travel between the coasts, chronicle small-town pageants, big-city politics, class and racial divisions, an emergent youth culture and more. They helped change the course of American art.

Twenty-two of those devastating photographs are on view in the Lannan show, including some of Frank’s most familiar images: a radiant black maid holding a cherubic white baby in Charleston, S.C., like an American apartheid “Madonna and Child”; a denim-clad Lancelot and Guinevere astride a ferocious Harley in Indianapolis; a bored elevator operator disgorging grandees at a plush hotel in Miami; a shrouded automobile before twin palms in Long Beach; Puerto Rican drag queens ruling over a New York City stoop. Rather than a comprehensive documentary purporting to record the length and breadth of the vast republic, “The Americans” comprises instead a poetic elegy to popularly enforced images of who we were--and in many cases, still are--as a people and a nation.

The smug self-satisfaction that marked the mood of the Eisenhower era had created a volatile situation, which Frank’s photographic odyssey was the first to intuit. Absent any political outlet, resistance to the prevailing complacency was being channeled into oppositional ways of living. A counterculture was being created.

Invisible on life’s surface but everywhere apparent to an artist on the road with a camera in his hand and the visual equivalent of perfect pitch, the inescapable intersection of those conflicting forces is wondrously pictured in “The Americans.” By turns dazzling, funny and tragic, its revelations are always poignantly made.

Few works of art occupy such a galvanic position within the culture that produced them as this one does. Simply, a critical moment in the life of the United States cannot be fully understood without coming to terms with “The Americans.”

That’s why I wish the show at Lannan, ably organized by the National Gallery of Art and accompanied by a very good catalog, featured even more examples from the group. (To see about 20 more, visit MOCA.) Still, the show does include several rarely seen contact sheets, which reveal the wealth of possibilities from which Frank had to choose in selecting pictures for the book and the context in which some of the most famous of them were taken. And this powerful achievement is exposed within the larger context of Frank’s entire career.

After “The Americans” Frank began to make films. (Most are being shown at MOCA and the Directors Guild during the run of the Lannan exhibition.) His work from the 1970s and 1980s shows a distinctly cinematic edge, with multiple photographs abutted, captions sometimes affixed, words and gestures often scratched into the emulsion and more. Just as his earlier photographs worked against typical assumptions of popular photography, so these work against the conventions of both static art photography and commercial narrative film, in an effort to create a distinctly visual poetry.

Ironically, the success of Frank’s own photographs and early films established many of the artistic conventions that his more recent work has sought to undermine. This magnificent and moving exhibition shows how the artist has never been content to stay in one place. Robert Frank is perpetually “moving out.”

* Lannan Foundation, 5401 McConnell Ave., (310) 306-1004, through May 19. Closed Mondays.