The purpose of this monograph is to describe the influence of Walker Evans’ American Photographs (1938) on The Americans (1959) of Robert Frank. To do this, the photographs in the two books have been edited and yoked together in a series of comparisons. What follows, then, is an exercise in speculation, one born of love and respect. It is offered as a working idea rather than an assured truth, a reasoned pretext for returning to the two great books it examines.
Frank’s photographs are printed here according to the way they were cropped in the Grove Press edition (1959) of his book; my discussion of The Americans will be based on this version of it.1 A small black book beautifully printed in gravure, this edition presented Frank’s pictures as a sequence of charged, lyric poems. In the later editions of The Americans (New York, Aperture, 1969; 1978), this sense of intimacy has been lost, both because the printing of the book changed, and because many of the photographs which had been precisely framed in the Grove version have been shown by Frank in these editions in uncropped variations or some other form. This has had the affect of compromising the impression of controlled ferocity that marked the earlier book, where every picture, regardless of the complexity of its structure, was clear and realized. Since the Grove book also describes Frank’s original response to present purposes, the definitive edition. Many of the matched photographs reproduced here obviously, and remarkably, echo one another; they demonstrate that, to a significant degree, Frank used Evans’ work as an iconographical sourcebook for his own pictures. The photographs that make up the rest of the comparisons, however, more loosely resemble one another, since they have been paired to describe something less tangible than clear correspondences of subject-matter, and, because of this, have been formally matched on the basis of only minor visual similarities. In a general sense, these comparisons are meant to remind us that the true shape of influence is one composed of feeling as well as conscious recognition, and, more particularly, to suggest that Frank found in Evans’ work not only a guide to what he might photograph in America, but a vision of how he might understand what he saw here. On pages 40 and 41, for example, the plate-like space that both pictures delineate is less relevant to the purposes of this book than the common sympathy the photographs express for the harrowing sorrow of being black in this country. And while a tin relic and a flag (20, 21) may be difficult to reconcile as a comparison, they are here because, apart from being stunning photographs, they speak of a mutual skepticism – the Ionic column is crushed, the flag immense and torn – and of both photographers’ gift for symbol-making.
The problem of composing these less literal comparisons could have been approached by using pictures not found in American Photographs. Frank obviously knew the work that Evans had done from fixed camera positions in the streets of Detroit and Chicago in 1946-47; he also clearly knew the great series of subway portraits that Evans had completed by 1941, but did not release in book form for twenty-five years (Many Are Called, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1966). Yet, while it is probable that Frank learned from all of Evans’ work, his debt to American Photographs is so profound that, by considering this one book, we can observe not only the fact of influence, but the way in which a brilliant young photographer embraced and comprehended a masterpiece.
In 1947, when he was 23, Robert Frank emigrated from Switzerland to the United States, and for two years worked as a fashion photographer in New York City. In 1950, he returned to Europe and, until 1952, traveled and photographed in Paris, Spain, Wales, and London. The pictures he made then are suffused with the mists and somberness one would expect to find in the work of any young follower of Bill Brandt, but the best of them were also intensely conceived, and openly described a sense of life that was serious and even tragic in its understanding.
Frank would probably be remembered for these photographs (as Walker Evans would be remembered for his work of the late twenties), even if he had done nothing else. But after returning to New York and a career as a freelance photographer, he applied for, and was granted, the first Guggenheim Fellowship in photography awarded to a non-American. In 1955-56, with the support of this fellowship, he traveled across the United States, his ambition “to produce an authentic contemporary document; the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation.”2
He prepared a book from the work he had done on this project, but could not find an American publisher for it. Then, in 1958, Robert Delpire published Les Americains in France and Italy, and, in the following year, Grove Press, apparently using additional sheets that had been printed in Europe, produced The Americans in this country.
The few critics who bothered to write about Frank’s book when it was first published detested it; words like “warped,” “sick,” “neurotic,” and “joyless” were used to characterize the work. Although, in retrospect, this response appears hysterical, it should be remembered that these critics – for the most part, writers in the photographic press – were reacting to a style of picture-making as much as they were condemning what they regarded as a captious attack on America. At a time when the dominant public sense of photography’s possibilities was identified with photojournalism and with the cherubic buoyancy of Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibition, The Americans presented harsh, difficult reading. By insisting that an iconography composed of common phenomena like a jukebox or gas station might compete with one that celebrated universal issues, and by articulating a style that embodied, as Jack Kerouac put it, “the strange secrecy of a shadow”3 rather than the public, choreographed grace of “the decisive moment,” Frank’s book contradicted assumptions that a significant part of the photographic community had adopted as law...
Reszta artukułu dostępna jest na stronach serwisu "americansuburbx" (Walker Evans and Robert Frank – An Essay on Influence, 1981, Tod Papageorge):
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/08/theory-walker-evans-and-robert-frank.html
Zapraszamy do przejrzenia albumów Roberta Franka oraz Walkera Evansa dostępnych w naszej ofercie:
http://www.bookoff.pl/search.php?text=robert+frank
http://www.bookoff.pl/search.php?text=walker+evans
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