Do you see this in Frank's "The Americans"

[Tuolumne]

The advent of the Robert Frank exhibit of "The Americans" at the Met in New York has unleashed a tide of new commentary on the famous photo book. I cite this from Anthony Lane's review in the Sept. 14 "New Yorker":

"The happiest picture in 'The Americans', entitled 'City Hall -- Reno, Nevada' shows a couple, presumably just married, with a water fountain where they might have hoped for an altar. Only at a pinch does their posture seem like celebration; he hugs her as you do when pulling someone back from the brink. Does she look down out of shyness, or into the future's gulf? No wonder Frank despised the heartening photographic layouts in 'Life' -- 'those goddamned stories with a beginning and an end.'"

The photo accompanies the text in the article. I have looked at this photo over and over, read and reread Lane's remarks and must confess - I just don't see it. Granted the photo is ambiguous, but even with Lane's remarks I can't get myself to see what he imagines in the photo. Do you see it?

I can't help but think that a massive amount of knowledge about the photographer, his philosophy, the history of the times and Frank's non-photographic philosophy about them, is required for such an interpretation. In other words, I don't think the meaning is in the photo, so much as what is known about the photos and their maker.

What do you think?

/T

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I agree. You see these invented meanings a lot in art criticism, and in literary criticism as well.

 

[DougFord]

[FONT=&quot]From an article published in the Telegraph.uk. dated 5-5-08. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] “For all its strange beauty, it is a frightening book. There is a Lord of the Flies feel to Frank's photograph of idle teens huddled near a jukebox as if taking a breather between gang fights.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Wait a minute. Well dressed tweens listening to a jukebox, where the most dangerous act afoot might be a retaliatory wedgie or a penny loafer ‘flat’, becomes ‘gang thugs taking a blow’?! [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]More crap has been written about this book than seems possible. 😱[/FONT]

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

[FONT=&quot]From an article published in the Telegraph.uk. dated 5-5-08. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] “For all its strange beauty, it is a frightening book. There is a Lord of the Flies feel to Frank's photograph of idle teens huddled near a jukebox as if taking a breather between gang fights.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Wait a minute. Well dressed tweens listening to a jukebox, where the most dangerous act afoot might be a retaliatory wedgie or a penny loafer ‘flat’, becomes ‘gang thugs taking a blow’?! [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]More crap has been written about this book than seems possible. 😱[/FONT]

LOL. Agreed. Although, gangbangers in the 1950's did dress much nicer than our modern thugs!

 

[summaron]

The scene by the jukebox isn't exactly out of Dick Clark's American Bandstand, the guys are a bit tough, not really the penny loafer-types and the girls are all in a careful separate space. I would have felt apprehensive entering that room. It's a little like a scene out of an early Tony Richardson or Carl Reisz film.

Anthony Lane is more at home -- and playful -- doing film criticism than photography critiques. The woman in the Reno picture may not look as if she's looking over the brink, but she does look introspective and in another "frame" of mind than the guy is. Lane's comments are like Pauline Kael's, especially when she would review neorealist films like Olmi's short early films The Fiances and Il Posto...

What was great about the Frank show, at least as it appeared at the San Francisco Museum, is that the pictures were blown up to different sizes. They were all in serious black frames but the variation of formats gave the show a life it wouldn't otherwise have had.

 

[Turtle]

I agree. Its the same as literary criticism. Hell, if Shakespere really had considered every nuance and angle some critics claim he did, he would have needed a brain the size of the sun and 100,000 years to write each play.

 

[nksyoon]

Robert Frank's Elevator Girl Sees Herself Years Later

"He saw in me something that most people didn't see. I have a big smile and a big laugh, and I'm usually pretty funny. So people see one thing in me. And I suspect Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac saw something that was deeper. That only people who were really close to me can see. It's not necessarily loneliness, it's ... dreaminess."

 

[Tuolumne]

Robert Frank's Elevator Girl Sees Herself Years Later

"He saw in me something that most people didn't see. I have a big smile and a big laugh, and I'm usually pretty funny. So people see one thing in me. And I suspect Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac saw something that was deeper. That only people who were really close to me can see. It's not necessarily loneliness, it's ... dreaminess."

What she sees in herself is not what Kerouac saw in the image:
"That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what's her name & address?"

I'm not saying there is nothing to be seen in Frank's photos, but they seem to be more a tabula rasa in which the viewer sees himself/herself rather than some fixed meaning that Frank saw and can be discerned. But perhaps that is what the best photos do.

/T

 

[.ken]

Imho this is the part where Winogrand's comments regarding photography really shines. He says that he just doesn't get all these artistic interpretation when comes to photography. A photograph doesn't tell us anything, it's light on surface and all these interpretations sometimes can be overly exaggerated. Maybe it's more there to "sell" a photo.

 

[summaron]

John Szarkowski somewhere says Frank's new vocabulary was comprised of "depots, lunch counters ... empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces."

The first New York Times review by Gilbert Millstein in 1960 was surprisingly sympathetic to The Americans, said it was a very important book, and that “Frank is unsparing, commenting on politicians in Hoboken or an empty barbershop in North Carolina...

“In a number of photographs he employs the jukebox as the symbol of a monster” ... “a suggestion of latent violence is added in the tight mouth of the soldier clamped around his cigar”

I found those comments helpful and not overcooked.

Also I agreed with this: “Kerouac’s fine descriptive reading is rather too optimistic for Frank’s photographs; he sees a different America than Frank does.”

Gilbert Millstein, New York Times, January 17, 1960

 

[kkdanamatt]

Listen to Robert Frank's audio interview here:

Listen to Robert Frank's audio interview here:

http://www.wnyc.org/go.py?r=http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2009/09/29#segment141587

 

[charjohncarter]

No (Lane), I grew up in that period, and knew all those type of places and almost recognize those people. I thought, when I saw the exhibit is San Francisco, he was an excellent chronicler of that period. I don't think it went any further than that. Just a good photographer taking photos of America is the Fifties.

I'll bet those photos weren't as great two years after they were taken as they are now. Another thing, at the SF MOMA show were the negatives and contact sheets he made. This guy was the first fire hose photographer. He sure could pick the best. But there were more than plenty of losers in those negatives. I should talk, though.