When I drove through West Texas in 2010 I spent quiet evenings in small, out of the way hotels and motels, reading On The Road by Jack Kerouac. It's no coincidence that Kerouac wrote the introduction to The Americans, a revolutionary collection of 80+ images from the 1950's by Robert Frank. Kerouac and Frank mined the same subject matter = culture without the saccharine gloss of the post WWII, suburban perspective in which everything is fine, everyone is doing well and there is no inequity or angst.
To many photographers who are slightly older than I Henri Cartier-Bresson was their role model and an exemplar of modern photography. HCB was probably singled handedly responsible for the sale of more Leica rangefinder cameras than any photographer before or since. But to my generation it was Robert Frank's piercing, counter-cultural point of view that made him our "hero."
The magazines and art critics of 1958 ( the publication date of Frank's breakthrough book) were livid about the style, content and presentation of Frank's work. To read reviews published at the time one would think his work was a complete failure, but what strong legs the work has turned out to have. Since 1958 it seems that each generation of photographers is in some way influenced by work done over six decades ago. Much of the interest in "street photography" was initially created and generated by his work.
Of all the masters of 20th century photography whose work I've seen, and even experienced first hand, in the form of original prints there are only two whom I would list an primary inspirations. As photographers whose vision helped to shape my understanding of the power of photography. Those two are Richard Avedon and Robert Frank.
Of the two I see Avedon as an outlier; an artist who would have been just a successful as a painter or illustrator but I see Frank as the most pure example of the artist solely as a photographer. He exemplified to me what the real power of photography is all about.
Now, I know that Robert Frank moved on from photography to work in motion pictures but that doesn't diminish what he accomplished in a few years in the middle of the 1950's, working with no crew, no assistants, no entourage and no roadmap.
We should all stop, grab a copy of The Americans, sit quietly and just soak in the images. Whether you like it or not the images in this book single-handedly changed our shared language of photography forever.
