1950s Individualism Revisited in Reissue of ‘The Americans’

“That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral. . . .”

That’s how Jack Kerouac sets the scene in “Robert Frank: The Americans” for a batch of unforgettable photographs shot on cross-country road trips in the mid-’50s (Scalo Publishers, $34.95, 180 pages). As Kerouac writes in the preface, Frank “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.”

In this reissue of the 1959 classic, the photographs remain uncannily revelatory of Americans’ loneliness and disconnection as well as their oddball individualism. A weary man gets a shoeshine in a vast, deserted men’s room. A politician on a big, boxy TV harangues an empty luncheonette table lit by a beam of sunshine. A young woman smiles as she relaxes on a chair in a deserted field at sunset.

As Kerouac suggests, there’s a fair amount of death in these photographs. Pensive black men in their Sunday best linger at the outskirts of a funeral; four people stand awkwardly beside the blanket-covered body of someone who died along a scrubby patch of Route 66.

But Frank’s people are primarily concerned with the business of living. Faces like the ones framed by the windows of a New Orleans trolley--wary, hopeful, wistful, oblivious--are declarations of proud individualism.

Certain talismanic objects loom large: glowing jukeboxes, advertising signs, cars (as wombs and prized possessions)--even a quintet of gas pumps gathered like faithful worshipers under the sign “Save.”

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In the ‘20s and ‘30s, Walker Evans--a photographer who was bored by nature and reluctant to bother people--found the pulse of daily life in its public messages: blazing in neon, painted on the sides of buildings, even printed in ink on newsprint.

In “Walker Evans: Signs” (J. Paul Getty Museum, $19.95, 69 pages), poet Andrei Codrescu embraces a select group of these images in his warmly energetic prose.

Evans is best known for his photographs of the rural South. His calm gaze took in homely storefronts raked by the afternoon sun and roadside stands with hand-lettered price-lists and proud slogans (“Honest Weights, Square Dealings”). In a shabby coal miner’s house, he noticed extroverted ads for graduation gifts and Coca-Cola hanging above a vacant rocking chair--a picture that, as Codrescu says, “vibrates with absence.”

Evans also was an extraordinarily perceptive photographer of people. The emphatic postures and gestures of two elderly men conversing on a storefront porch in 1936 reflect the expansive way Americans carry themselves even in hard times. Portraits of subway riders in New York (made with a hidden camera) show tense, vulnerable faces alongside vivacious ads promising the good life or impersonal signs listing the train’s destinations.

As Romanian-born Codrescu writes, “Evans showed us how to see America.”

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Soothing, refreshing, sometimes fabulously extravagant, fountains have been the balm of public life for centuries. “Fountains: Splash and Spectacle” (Rizzoli International Publications Inc., $60, 208 pages) corrals a huge subject into chapters by numerous experts on the history, engineering, symbolism, practical use and urban life of man-made waterworks.

Although more large photographs would have given this subject a bigger splash, the 300 illustrations cover a lot of ground, from the elaborate design of the 18th century Trevi Fountain in Rome--with its sculptured trees, rocks, mythological figures and sparkling cascades--to modest drinking fountains donated to American cities by 19th century temperance advocates.

In recent decades, symbolic features have become more abstract but no less engaging. The Los Angeles firm WET Design, whose projects include fountains at the Music Center and California Plaza, pioneered high-concept water: a tight, computer-controlled choreography of leaping jets that disappear into the ground.

Fountain-as-raw-thrill is Bay Area landscape architect Lawrence Halperin’s contribution to the genre. At the Ira C. Keller Fountain in Portland, Ore., 13,000 gallons of water per minute surge over 18-foot-high slabs of concrete cut to look like mountains of sheared stone.

Other designers have investigated mist, colored light and variable spray patterns. Simplicity works too. Maya Lin’s Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., is a black granite table with a stream flowing softly across the etched names of freedom fighters. When visitors touch the names, their hands are bathed in the waters of forgiveness and renewal.

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Exactly how photographer Philippe Glade produces such trippy color effects with flowers is his secret, but “Brilliance” (Chronicle Books, 96 pages, $16.95) is a sensualist’s treat.

Nose to nose with a hibiscus, the camera lens turns it into a dappled pattern of pastels topped with a red asterisk. A prim hybrid tea rose reveals lush velvety pink whorls. “Santa Claus” dahlia petals look like ribbon ice cream. Too bad some designer in love with white space has reduced many of these shots to miniature blips on the page.

* Cathy Curtis reviews art and photography books every four weeks.