America, 50 Years Later

There is a terrific piece by Luc Sante in yesterday's Wall Street Journal on the 50th anniversary of Robert Frank's book of photographs, The Americans. I first learned of the Zurich-born photographer via Jack Kerouac, whose introduction to a reprinting of The Americans was included in a weird collection of the Beat icon's non-fiction, which I read in my late teens. I had no interest in photography then, but was intrigued by Kerouac's description of Frank and his work--a European photographer driving across the United States, snapping pictures of Main Streets, diners, jukeboxes, empty highways, gas stations, dime stores, and lunch counters, some of which were even taken from inside his car through the rain-streaked grime of his windshield.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I love the United States of America (much as I enjoy traveling abroad, there's nothing quite like returning to the country in which I was born). But the older I get, the more I realize I'm more in love the idea of America. So was Robert Frank, which is why I think his pictures resonate so strongly today. But what was interesting to me as I looked at the photos accompanying Sante's WSJ piece was what has changed and what remains the same about America 50 years later.

For instance, Frank's pictures present an America cast in muddy shades of black, white, and gray. Furthermore, each shot looks as though it has been smeared with soot from a coal stove. No matter if he was presenting a beautiful woman in a posh hotel elevator or a cowboy leaning against a trash can, the insistent grittiness of the photos were a looming reminder of the massive industrial might of the United States. The America most people enjoyed in the 1950s was the byproduct of decades of chugging iron furnaces, aluminum smelting plants, flaming gas refineries, etc. But in these pics, it seems that people are too worried about nuclear war and segregation to ever think that corporate greed was slowly taking away their livelihood, like a rug pulled out from underneath them.

Of course, it would take the great (and American-born) Stephen Shore to capture the outcome of that particular American devastation, 20 years later. In Shore's best work, the American landscape of the 1970s is choked with corporate logos and slogans. Even mountains have taken a back seat to billboards.

As for America today, I would have to say that the best photographer capturing it is Minnesota-based Alec Soth. His Last Days of W is one of the most chilling collections of photography I've ever seen. Yet, as an American, I am somehow comforted by it all. As with Frank's work, Soth's photos will likely be better appreciated when America has some perspective. As for now, I know of relatively few Americans willing to admit that this is what America looks like...