walker evans and robert frank

PHOTOGRAPHY: THE MISSING CRITICSM

WALKER EVANS AND ROBERT FRANK:AN ESSAY ON INFLUENCE

BY TOD PAPAGEORGE

TH E PU RPO S E O F T H IS MO N O G RA P H IS T Odescribe the influence of Walker Evans’American Photographs (1938) on The Americans(1959) of Robert Frank. To do this, thephotographs in the two books have been editedand 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 aworking idea rather than an assured truth, areasoned pretext for returning to the two greatbooks it examines.

Frank’s photographs are printed hereaccording to the way they were cropped in theGrove Press edition (1959) of his book; mydiscussion of The Americans will be based onthis version of it.1 A small black book beautifullyprinted in gravure, this edition presented Frank’spictures as a sequence of charged, lyric poems.In the later editions of The Americans (NewYork, Aperture, 1969; 1978), this sense ofintimacy has been lost, both because the printingof the book changed, and because many of thephotographs which had been precisely framed inthe Grove version have been shown by Frank inthese editions in uncropped variations or someother form. This has had the affect ofcompromising the impression of controlledferocity that marked the earlier book, whereevery picture, regardless of the complexity of itsstructure, was clear and realized. Since the Grovebook also describes Frank’s original response topresent purposes, the definitive edition.

Many of the matched photographs_______________________________________This essay was originally written in 1981 for acatalog produced in conjunction with anexhibition curated by Tod Papageorge at theYale University Art Gallery. Copyright by TodPapageorge. Papageorge has been the directorof the Graduate Study in Photography at theYale School of Art since 1979. A book of hiswork, Passing Through Eden: Photographs ofCentral Park, was published this year by Steidl.This essay is the first to appear in The MissingCriticism series, which republishes out-of-printwriting on photography.

reproduced here obviously, and remarkably, echoone another; they demonstrate that, to asignificant degree, Frank used Evans’ work as aniconographical sourcebook for his own pictures.The photographs that make up the rest of thecomparisons, however, more loosely resembleone another, since they have been paired todescribe something less tangible than clearcorrespondences of subject-matter, and, becauseof this, have been formally matched on the basisof only minor visual similarities. In a generalsense, these comparisons are meant to remind usthat the true shape of influence is one composedof feeling as well as conscious recognition, and,more particularly, to suggest that Frank found inEvans’ work not only a guide to what he mightphotograph in America, but a vision of how hemight understand what he saw here. On pages 40and 41, for example, the plate-like space thatboth pictures delineate is less relevant to thepurposes of this book than the commonsympathy the photographs express for theharrowing sorrow of being black in this country.And while a tin relic and a flag (20, 21) may bedifficult to reconcile as a comparison, they arehere because, apart from being stunningphotographs, they speak of a mutual skepticism –the Ionic column is crushed, the flag immenseand torn – and of both photographers’ gift forsymbol-making.

The problem of composing these lessliteral comparisons could have been approachedby using pictures not found in AmericanPhotographs. Frank obviously knew the workthat Evans had done from fixed camera positionsin the streets of Detroit and Chicago in 1946-47;he also clearly knew the great series of subwayportraits that Evans had completed by 1941, butdid not release in book form for twenty-fiveyears (Many Are Called, Boston, HoughtonMifflin, 1966). Yet, while it is probable thatFrank learned from all of Evans’ work, his debtto American Photographs is so profound that, byconsidering this one book, we can observe notonly the fact of influence, but the way in which abrilliant young photographer embraced andcomprehended a masterpiece.

IN 1947, WHEN HE WAS 23, ROBERT FRANKemigrated from Switzerland to the United States,and for two years worked as a fashionphotographer in New York City. In 1950, hereturned to Europe and, until 1952, traveled andphotographed in Paris, Spain, Wales, andLondon. The pictures he made then are suffusedwith the mists and somberness one would expect

Papageorge | Evans and Frank: An Essay on Influence 2 of 8

PHO TOGRAP HY: THE MISSI NG CRI TICISM

to find in the work of any young follower of BillBrandt, but the best of them were also intenselyconceived, and openly described a sense of lifethat was serious and even tragic in itsunderstanding.

Frank would probably be rememberedfor these photographs (as Walker Evans wouldbe remembered for his work of the late twenties),even if he had done nothing else. But afterreturning to New York and a career as afreelance photographer, he applied for, and wasgranted, the first Guggenheim Fellowship inphotography awarded to a non-American. In1955-56, with the support of this fellowship, hetraveled across the United States, his ambition“to produce an authentic contemporarydocument; the visual impact should be such aswill nullify explanation.”2

He prepared a book from the work hehad done on this project, but could not find anAmerican publisher for it. Then, in 1958, RobertDelpire published Les Americains in France andItaly, and, in the following year, Grove Press,apparently using additional sheets that had beenprinted in Europe, produced The Americans inthis country.

The few critics who bothered to writeabout Frank’s book when it was first publisheddetested it; words like “warped,” “sick,”“neurotic,” and “joyless” were used tocharacterize the work. Although, in retrospect,this response appears hysterical, it should beremembered that these critics – for the most part,writers in the photographic press – were reactingto a style of picture-making as much as theywere condemning what they regarded as acaptious attack on America. At a time when thedominant public sense of photography’spossibilities was identified with photojournalismand with the cherubic buoyancy of Steichen’s“Family of Man” exhibition, The Americanspresented harsh, difficult reading. By insistingthat an iconography composed of commonphenomena like a jukebox or gas station mightcompete with one that celebrated universalissues, and by articulating a style that embodied,as Jack Kerouac put it, “the strange secrecy of ashadow”3 rather than the public, choreographedgrace of “the decisive moment,” Frank’s bookcontradicted assumptions that a significant partof the photographic community had adopted aslaw.

To Frank, however, photojournalismwas a meretricious form of photography. Itsimplified the world and, in addition, contorted itinto a shape that permitted, as he once said,

“those goddamned stories with a beginning andan end.”4 But its most subtle danger was that itallowed its greatest practitioners to subvert thevery question of the truth by concentrating theirskills on creating pictures that were beautiful,rather than directly responsive to experience.Since, as Frank understood it, thephotojournalist’s implicit obligation was toapprove of what he described, his intelligenceand ability could then only be used to display notwhat he felt, but how gracefully he was able tomake a picture.

It appears that Frank identified HenriCartier-Bresson with what he thought was gliband insubstantial about photojournalism. TheDecisive Moment, Cartier-Bresson’s first majorbook, had been published in 1952, and, among asmall congregation of photographers, resulted inthe fraternal canonization of the French artist.Grown men were reported to have seen himbecome invisible as he photographed, but eventhe skeptics who could not believe that regardedhim and his work with awe. Frank, however,would have none of it, saying of the great Frenchphotographer that “you never felt he was movedby something that was happening other than thebeauty of it, or just the composition.”5

Yet while it was clear that Frank hadrejected the influence of Cartier-Bresson, it wasnot at all apparent that his work had beenaffected by that of any other photographer. Frankhad produced The Americans in little more thantwo years. His earlier, European pictures hadbeen radically different in form – they had, infact, looked much more like Cartier-Bresson’sphotographs of the thirties. Therefore, whenother photographers began to recognize thebrilliance of The Americans, Frank’sachievement was thought to be sudden,unprecedented, self-born; and when he then gaveup photography for film-making only a fewyears after the publication of his book, the framefor a myth was established. Although TheAmericans deeply influenced the work of thefollowing generation of photographers, it itselfwas assumed to have escaped the pressures andcontinuities of tradition.

During this period, Walker Evans wasprobably as secreted a presence in the smallworld of serious photography as a major artistcould have been. In 1956, a group of hisphotographs was included in a show at theMuseum of Modern Art,6 but his last significantexhibition had taken place eight years earlier atthe Art Institute of Chicago, and his next did notoccur until 1962, again at the Museum of



Modern Art, in conjunction with the publicationof the second edition of American Photographs.Garry Winogrand, then a member of theAmerican Society of Magazine Photographersand an associate of the Pix photo agency, hassaid that Evans’ work was never mentioned inthe discussions he had then with otherphotographers, most of whom were ambitiousphotojournalists. Only when Winograndmentioned his plans for a cross-country trip didDan Weiner, a friend of his – and, incidentally, aphotographer about whose work Evans laterwrote some appreciative words – advise him tolook at American Photographs.

Despite Evans’ relative anonymity, hisrespect for Frank was a matter of public record.He had helped him apply for the GuggenheimFellowship which supported the production ofThe Americans, and, although this was lessknown, had had to insist that Frank make theapplication when the younger photographerwanted to return to Europe to work. He alsowrote eloquently about the selection of Frank’swork that was included in the 1958 U.S. CameraAnnual. But, with all this, it appears that Evanswas regarded as just a sponsor from whom Frankhad received nothing more than the letters ofrecommendation an artist or scholar is expectedto write for someone young and gifted.

There were reasons, however – apartfrom Evans’ relationship to Frank, and evenapart from the connections between their pictures– why American Photographs might have beenremembered after Frank’s book was published.Both books were bound in black (Evans’ in biblecloth, the cover of hymnals), and were almost thesame size – American Photographs a bit taller,The Americans slightly longer, to accommodatethe different shapes of their pictures. Evans’book contained eighty-seven photographs,Frank’s eighty-three. And, of course, the titles ofthe two books – as well as the block layout oftheir title pages – echoed one another. Even thespare design of The Americans, which wasunusual at a time when most picture books werelaid out like magazines, might have recalledAmerican Photographs, since this design can bedescribed almost exactly by quoting a critic’sreservation about the first edition of Evans’book: "The pictures are printed on the right-handpage, the left unsullied except for a pagenumeral. Though the treatment is in keeping withthe book, the reader would probably prefer tohave a few of the aids to easy enlightenmentsuch as captions, and possible footnotes with the

pictures.”7 But no one, apparently, noticed theseresemblances.

Although, since The Americans waspublished, Frank has consistently stated thatWalker Evans (along with Bill Brandt) was thephotographer who most influenced his work,8 thefew writers who have discussed the two men inrelation to one another generally have done so bysetting them in a Manichaean opposition. In thisequation, Evans, on the side of the angels, is seenas a moralist whose work unequivocally acceptsand elevates the raw material of vernacularAmerican culture, while Frank, in the devil’sparty, is seen as the photographic equivalent ofRimbaud – an anarchic poet who sings one brutalsong, and then, in despair and exaltation, orwhatever joy is found in conjunction with thecreation of something incomparable, denies hisgift by rejecting it.9 That the sorrowing worldFrank’s book describes has been set againstEvans’ lightstruck community, where, in at leasta casual reading, everything possesses the cleargorgeousness of achieved fact, is unsurprising.But the suggestion that the two photographersare related only because they share the samegeneral subject ignores the particular debt thatThe Americans owes to American Photographs,and, with that, disregards the most subtletriumphs of Frank’s book, its transformation ofEvans’ vision.

THE FIRST CRITICS OF THE AMERICANScondemned its content; recent critics haveattacked it by attempting to describe Frank’sphotographic style. Possibly reacting to thevariations in cropping that appear in the latereditions of the book, or, more probably, lookingfor the “snapshot aesthetic” under any availablestone, they have assumed this style to behaphazard and contemptuously casual. Onewriter, for example, has said that Frank“produced pictures that look as if a kid had takenthem while eating a Popsicle and then had themdeveloped and printed at the corner drugstore.”10

The things in Frank’s pictures which havebothered these critics – occasional blur, obviousgrain, the use of available light, the cutting off ofobjects by the frame – are all, however,characteristic of picture journalism, and,arguably, of the entire history of hand-cameraphotography: Erich Salomon’s work, forexample, done for the most part in the twenties,could be discussed in similar terms. The form ofFrank’s work, then, is not radical in the truesense of the word: it does not strike to the root ofthe tradition it serves. The stylistic exaggerations



which occur in his pictures serve only to retainthat sense of resident wildness we recognize ingreat lyric poetry – they are present to callattention not to themselves, but to the emotionalworld of Frank’s subjects, and to his response tothose subjects. When, in the statement he wroteshortly before The Americans was published,Frank said: “It is important to see what isinvisible to others. Perhaps the look of hope orthe look of sadness. Also it is always theinstantaneous reaction to oneself that produces aphotograph,”11 he was expressing his belief thatboth his perceptions (it is significant that he doesnot mention an intervening camera in thesesentences) and the photographs which resultfrom them are essentially unmediated and true.

This desire of Frank’s to hold the shapeof his feelings in what he made is an ambitionfound in all Romantic art, one that his stylebrilliantly encompasses and describes. There is awonderful illusion of speed trapped in hisphotographs, a sense of rapidity usually creatednot by the movement of Frank’s subjects, but bythe gesture that he made as he framed hispictures. To photographers who have followedFrank, this autographic gesture incorporates amystery, one that is distorted, and certainly notexplained, by saying that he “shot on the run” or“from the hip.”12 For the beauty of this gesture isthat, caught by such speed, his subjects remainclear, fully recognized, as if the photographerhad only glanced at what he wanted to show, butwas able to seize it at the moment it unhesitantlyrevealed itself.

Despite the grace of this notational style(or perhaps because of it), Frank seems to havefelt that movement within the frames of hisphotographs would only disturb their sense, and,with a few exceptions, ignored the use ofdramatic gesture and motion in The Americans (afact which again suggests his feeling aboutCartier-Bresson’s work). In two of his pictures ofconvention delegates, and in one of a woman in agambling casino, he shows emphatic handgestures. In another photograph, he looks downonto a man striding forward under a neon arrow,and, in yet another, describes two girls skippingaway from his camera (21). Otherwise, hissubjects move, if at all, toward, and, in a singlememorable case (55), by him – studies inphysiognomy, rather than disclosures of agathering beauty.

The characteristic gestures in hispictures are the slight, telling motions of thehead and upper body: a glance (19, 37), a stare(15, 41), a hand brought to the face (35, 51, 53),

an arched neck (17, 55), pursed lips (15, 31).They suggest that Frank, like Evans, believedsignificance in a photograph might be consonantwith the repose of the things it described. Hispictures, of course, are not acts of contemplation– they virtually catalogue the guises of anxiety –but they are stilled, and their meanings found notin broad rhythms of gesture and form, but in theconstellations traced by the figures or objectsthey show, and the short, charged distancesbetween them.

One of the unacknowledgedachievements of The Americans is the series ofgroup portraits – odd assemblages of heads,usually seen in profile, that gather in quick,serried cadences and push at the cutting edges oftheir frames. In the soft muted light thatilluminates them, these heads are drawn with thesculptural brevity of those found on worn coins.But, even in this diminishment, as they clusterand fill the shallow space of Frank’s pictures,they assume the unfurling, cursive shapes ofgreat Romantic art.

As this book shows (31, 35, 41, 51, 53,55), these photographs beautifully elaborateEvans’ hand-camera pictures, pictures which arenot as judgmental as Frank’s, but also not asformally complex and moving. Although Frank’smost literal recastings of American Photographsoccur when he is remembering Evans’ view-camera pictures – for example, a gas station (46),a parked car (14), a statue (58) – theseextravagant translations of the olderphotographer’s bluntest work eloquently revealone aspect of Frank’s extraordinary gifts as aphotographer.

TH E EFFECT O F FRA N K’S P ICTU RE S ISinseparable from the direct, rapid voice thatseems to inform them. Evans’ photographs, onthe other hand, appear impersonal, and usuallyare presented as if they were just the inevitableresult of a process in which someone (Evans)had found a subject (or let it find him), set up acamera (in noon light), framed the picture(centered it), and exposed his film (one sheet foreach subject). This is a magician’s illusion, ofcourse – such clarity is bought only at the cost ofprodigious labor and concentration – but it is thisillusion which takes us again and again to Evans’pictures, as if by studying them we felt we coulddiscover where, in all that sunlight, thephotographer had left the clue that would revealhow such a radiant deceit had been carried out.

It might be thought that Evans’ use ofthe view camera demanded this plain style. The



employment of such a camera requires at leastphysical deliberation since a tripod must be putin place for the machine to be used; and, becauseits frame is relatively square, the camera couldbe assumed to have been designed to directlyface a centered subject. As a comparison with thework of his contemporaries would show,however, Evans’ insistence on this frontal,archer’s stance constituted a remarkableconception of photographic style, one that, evenfor its time, probably appeared willfully spareand austere.

A result of this stance is that it forcesattention to the surfaces rather than to thesculptural mass of Evans’ subjects; at the sametime, it is sufficiently distanced that hisphotographs deny us the embarrassing pleasuresof pure texture. In Evans’ early work of thetwenties, space had been compressed anddeployed in patterns that appeared as significantas the shadows, billboards, and signs that werethe ostensible subjects of the pictures. But inmany of his later photographs, Evans showsfacades and objects that, while framed to mimicthe planar severities of Cubism, are so preciselyand lucidly described that their meanings, andnot their pictorial structures, are what strike usabout them first. A battered tin relic (20) is asymbolic fact and only incidentally a perfectCubist construction; and a movie poster (18)details an emblematic horror before it asksquestions about the nature of collage.

This stance also superficially suggeststhe specimen case, taxonomic passion, a desire tocatalogue and, in some vaguely scientific way, toclassify a time and place. Although it is clear thatthe shape of Evans’ world is one that has beensensed rather than ordained by an idea orexternal structure, this impression of preciseaxiomatic demonstration is inseparable from thefeeling of crystalline beauty his work presents.

It appears that Evans could find thisbeauty in anything – in the way a chair was madeor a sign painted by hand – and that, with asmuch grace, he could map its deeper patterns –by showing, for example, how a town sprawledon a hill and had taken itself down to a factory ormill by a river. Our dominant sense of his work,however, is not that it is simply beautiful, butthat, in the act of so precisely naming the world,the photographer has divested it of its usual,customary values, and granted it a new meaning– that of having-been-truly-seen.

Lincoln Kirstein has said that Evanscould wait days for the correct light to reveal hissubject, a patience implied in some of his

greatest work.13 For it is this obsession withlight, as much as his employment of the viewcamera or the formal austerity of his style, thatdistinguishes Evans’ photographs. By definingboth his subjects and photography itself throughthe use of this irradiating, informing light, Evansmakes an identification between the two which issimple, direct, and profound. As we have seen,an effect of this identification is that the presenceof the photographer is suppressed in his pictures,but this, of course, is at the heart of his strategy:if the artist is hidden, his choices will appearunprejudiced, equal in their gravity, andphotography will be honored as the vehicle oftheir revelation.

Yet, if it can be said that Evans’ work isessentially denotative, and its ambition is toname irrefutably what it shows, it must be addedthat, almost paradoxically, through theconcentrated descriptive power of photography,his pictures also claim those other trailingmeanings that lie hidden in things. By being sovividly, immediately present – and socompassionately unmasked – these objects,facades, corners of towns and rooms, and humanfaces not only report what they are, but alsosuggest the improvised, heartfelt, and difficulthistories that brought them to the moment Evansphotographed them. When, for example, heframes two chairs in a black barber shop (42),the battered room they share is described notonly as a dilapidated vanity, but also as ameeting place and, possibly, an improvisedsurgery (where a properly desperate man mightgo to have a tooth pulled or a bullet removedfrom a wound), meanings which reside in thedetail of Evans’ picture as an etymology residesin a word.

Robert Frank’s photograph of a barberchair (43), on the other hand, owns no particularmeaning at all: in its collapsed space, the chairglows with the insolent mystery of an objectruling a troubling dream (a dream inseparablefrom the photographer himself, whose reflectionis outlined on the screen door). And when Frankphotographs three crosses commemorating ahighway accident (61) – a picture which, in thesequencing of The Americans, follows aphotograph of a statue of St. Francis (59), andprecedes one of an automobile assembly line –the compression of sky, shadow, and landscapewhich occurs in the picture again describes aworld marked by the adjacency of dreams anddeath. Evans’ photograph of a graveyard (60),however, places the cemetery within a townwhere people live, work, and go to church. It



suggests that the fact of death is simply one factin life, not, as Frank’s picture would have it, itscontrolling principle.

Today, the beauty of AmericanPhotographs is apparent to us, since we have hadforty years to discover it and to forget the terriblereality of the time in which the book was made.For the most part, however, the first readers ofEvans’ book viewed it as an indictment ofAmerica as well as a dispassionate account ofwhat was worthy in this culture: “Here are therecords of the age before an imminent collapse.[Evans’] pictures exist to testify to the symptomsof waste and selfishness that caused the ruin andto salvage whatever was splendid for the futurereference of the survivors,” wrote LincolnKirstein in his afterword to AmericanPhotographs.14 And while it many offend oursense of American Photographs to hear itdescribed in this way, a selective study of thebook – which, in effect, is what this monographpresents – supports Kirstein’s position, if not hisrhetoric. Evans, after all, thought of Baudelaireas the dominant influence on his work, andfound in Flaubert’s exact, disinterested style acorrelative to his own. This is not to say that hisbook is misinterpreted if it is seen as a “lyricdocument” (Evans’ phrase) – it is only to suggestthat its most passionate reader, Robert Frank,considered it with an understanding thatencompassed its pitilessness as well as its grace.

IN FRA N K’S T RA N SFO RMIN G V ISIO N O FAmerica, a car is a casket (45), a trolley a prison(41), a flag a shroud. As for us, we stand in oddgroups and stare at some imposingly sad eventbeyond the frame of Frank’s camera, while hecaptures us and the event itself is forgotten. Allevents, in fact – the rodeo, the Fourth of Julypicnic, Yom Kippur, the graduation, the charityball, the highway death, the funeral – serve onlyas reasons to gather and for Frank to condense usinto a symbol. Even the few signs which heallows in his photographs are denied their usualmeanings and instead point to the pictures’ newcontents: a group of fans at a Hollywoodpremiere smile at a movie star under a sign thatcalls them “Squires;” some kids in a candy store,two of whom have their eyes strangely closed,crowd by a placard which says “Made Blinds;” acowboy lounges in front of a “Dodge” truck.And, in this country where only newlywedssmile (City Hall, Reno, Nevada), the human faceitself is drawn back as if it were a mask – severe,sad, and rapt.

Like most Romantic works of art, TheAmericans is marked by a lack ofcomprehensiveness: a continent is spanned, butits life compressed into a single grief. Yet, whatis memorable about Frank’s book is not that it ispassionate, or its form defiant, or its vision bitter– these are attributes of the book, not itsstructuring force: what shapes The Americansand gives it resonance is the transfiguring powerof Frank’s eye. Although his feelings areinextricably wound into his perceptions, andthreaten at every point to overwhelm them,Frank’s astonishing ability to draw the emblemfrom the fact serves him – by limiting him – inthe same way that Evans’ rigorous acceptance ofthe prodigious descriptive energy of photographyserved the older artist. That Frank refused only toimply what he felt, but, instead, in a long seriesof exact symbols, precisely traced what herecognized, defines a genius as conscious andextraordinary as that which informs Evans’American Photographs; that he divined inEvans’ work a vision cognate with his ownfurious sense of the truth, and – in a processembracing memory, intuition, guile, rapacity ofsight, and love – transmuted it into the searingaccount of this country given by The Americansis, however, a creative miracle.

FRA N K’S B O O K PR ESEN TS A STR IK IN Gexample of the kind of luck an artist can fall into,where, responding to a clue that the world, or awork of art, or someone else reveals to him, hesuddenly discovers his authentic voice. This isprofound luck, and, in a person of feeling, couldproduce uneasiness, particularly, as with Frank,when the good fortune is used to such aremarkable advantage, and used only once. AsHarold Bloom asks in The Anxiety of Influence,“what strong maker desires the realization that hehas failed to create himself?”15

Bloom’s question could be countered, ifnot answered, by T. S. Eliot’s directpropositions: “Immature poets imitate; maturepoets steal; bad poets deface what they take, andgood poets make it into something better, or atleast something different.”16 Eliot’s position –according to which Frank may be called both amature and a good poet – has the advantage ofbeing closer than it seems Bloom’s is to the dailyjoys and emergencies of artistic practice, since itdoes not exclude the possibility of pleasure –whether the minor excitement of stealingsomething without fear of arrest, the deeperenhancement of loving a thing well enough toserve it, or the profound delight of making an



object so free of previous authority that it can becalled new.

But, if only by insisting on theimportance of such a relationship, Bloom’squestion can help us understand Frank’sconnection to Evans and his work, a connectionwhich remained important to Frank after he hadprepared The Americans for publication. Foreven his last photographic project, a series of tenpictures taken in 1958 from the Fifth Avenuebus, resembles, in concept at least, a series ofsubway portraits started by Evans in 1938,presumably about the time that AmericanPhotographs was prepared and published.

The crucial, disconcerting fact aboutFrank’s career is that he rejected photography, adecision that, as we now see, cannot beexplained by suggesting that Frank simply hadsaid all that he could as a photographer andwanted to try something new. For if Frank didhave nothing left to say, it seems fair to speculatethat it was because he had exhausted thestructure provided for him by Evans’ work, andwas left, not with a continuing love ofphotography but only with a passionate need todescribe himself (a self freed from Evans) andhis sense of his personal world. The films he hasmade since then support this idea that he is aman with a self, and not a world, to describe. Ashe said in 1977, “a lot of my work deals withmyself, especially my films. It’s very hard [forme] to get away from myself. It seems, almost,that’s all I have.”17

One thing that the imperial self maypossess over and over again, of course, is itspast, something that Frank has done in relation toThe Americans. He has not only revised thelatest edition of the book in a way that suggeststhe rare example of a poet going back to hisnotebooks and finding the first, unfinished draftsof his poems more interesting than those in print,he has also published and exhibited editedcontact sheets from it, and, in two of his films,directed sequences which show him or asurrogate flipping through piles of photographsthat include pictures from The Americans. In oneof these films, Conversations in Vermont, thesepictures are mixed with family snapshots, and, inthe second, Me and My Brother, shuffled withfashion photographs. Frank’s point seems to bethat, in memory, all things are equal, or equallyprovisional. Yet the common effect of every oneof these references to The Americans is todiminish the book, to suggest that it is open toemendation as any report, and that its precisionsare no more remarkable, and are to be no more

respected, than the precisions needed to makeany clear photograph. It seems that Frank wantsto dispel, both for himself and for his audience,the mystery that has been created by his greatbook, and that he feels that if he obscures itsoriginal clarity, and exposes what he can of theprocess by which it was made, he might yetpossess it as a living idea, as something he is stillcreating, and, at the same time, hold it awayfrom himself, as if it were no longer his.

This kind of speculation simplifies morethan it explains. It disregards the fact that someof Frank’s work as a film-maker, particularly Meand My Brother, is brilliant, and that his strugglewith a difficult, new medium is admirable. It alsoappears querulous by insisting that the latereditions of The Americans fail an expectationthat is perhaps unreasonable. But tangled with allof this is the dominating fact that Frank’smasterpiece was a book born of his love ofanother book, and that, with this – like WalkerEvans – Frank has had to live with the memoryof an overwhelming early triumph. Whetherthere is sorrow in this is something only he cansay. As for us, we have his wonderful book, and,traced within it, the figure of a tradition.

1 All but one, on page 35, reproduced from a print inwhich a figure has been cut off at the left edge of theframe. Also, a few of the Evans photographsreproduced here are slight variations of those found inhis book, the most obvious one being his picture of ablack barber shop (42).2 Robert Frank, “A Statement . . . ,” in 1958 U.S.Camera Annual (New York, U.S. Camera Publishing,1958), p. 115.3 Kerouac’s introduction to The Americans – a longexhalation of prose that jumbled “visionary angels,”“madroad driving men,” and Kerouac’s obviousrespect for Frank into a woolly, beautiful chant –remains the warmest, most responsive description wehave of the spirit of Frank’s pictures.4 Eugenia Parry Janis and Wendy MacNeil, eds.,Photography within the Humanities (Danbury, N.H.,Addison House, 1977), p.56.5 Ibid., p. 56.6 The wall label for his part of this exhibition waswritten by Evans himself: “Valid photography, likehumor, seems to be too serious a matter to talk aboutseriously. If, in a note, it can’t be defined weightily,what it is not can be stated with the utmost finality. Itis not the image of Secretary Dulles descending from aplane. It is not cute cats, nor touchdowns, nor nudes;motherhood; arrangements of manufacturers’products. Under no circumstances is it anything everanywhere near a beach. In short it is not a lie – a cliché– somebody else’s idea. It is prime vision combinedwith quality of feeling, no less.”



7 Unsigned review, “American Photographs,” U.S.Camera, vol. 1 (Autumn 1938), p. 47. Interestinglyenough, when the second edition of AmericanPhotographs was published in 1962, four years afterFrank’s book, the title of Evans’ pictures were movedfrom indices following the two parts of the book to the“unsullied” left-hand pages opposite the photographs.The result was a book that, except for the presence ofthe page numbers, precisely duplicated the design ofThe Americans.8 Frank’s clearest acknowledgement of this occurs inthe last paragraph of “A Statement . . . ” (op. cit.,p. 115): “The work of two contemporaryphotographers, Bill Brandt of England and theAmerican, Walker Evans, have influenced me. When Ifirst looked at Walker Evans’ photographs I thought ofsomething Malraux wrote: ‘To transform destiny intoawareness.’ One is embarrassed to want so much foroneself. But, how else are you going to justify yourfailure and your effort.”

The distinction in emphasis that Frankmakes here between Brandt and Evans describes therelative importance of their influence on his work.Although Brandt’s photographs shaped the sense ofmood and feeling that informs Frank’s pictures,Evans’ work provided the younger artist with aparadigm, or structure, that allowed Frank to releaseand express his great gifts as a photographer.9 This description compresses the evolution of Frank’smyth: it is only in the last few years that writers havethought to praise Frank for giving up something hepracticed so wonderfully. For example, see WilliamStott, “Walker Evans, Robert Frank and the Landscapeof Dissociation,” artscanada, vol. 31, nos. 3 & 4(December 1974), pp. 83-85.10 Janet Malcolm, “Two Roads, One Destination,”Diana & Nikon (Boston, David R. Godine, 1980),p. 114. Malcolm’s metaphorical “kid” may use aneighborhood pharmacy, but it appears that Frank, atleast in matters relating to his work, avoided them: “Ifthe photographer wants to be an artist, his thoughtscannot be developed overnight at the cornerdrugstore.” Frank, op. cit., p. 115.11 Frank, op. cit., p. 115.12 Stott, op. cit., p. 84.13 From the diaries of Lincoln Kirstein, quoted by JohnSzarkowski in Walker Evans (New York, Museum ofModern Art, 1971), p. 12.14 Lincoln Kirstein, “Photographs of America: WalkerEvans,” in American Photographs (New York,Museum of Modern Art, 1938), p. 196. Kirstein’sessay is one of the jewels of photographic criticism.While, in the passage quoted above, he may seemextravagantly prophetic, he had, of course,extravagantly good reasons – apart from theDepression – for sensing an “imminent collapse”somewhere: in September 1939, twelve months afterpublication of American Photographs, Germanyinvaded Poland.15 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York,Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 5.

16 T. S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger,” in Frank Kermode,ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York, HarcourtBrace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 153.17 Janis and MacNeil, op. cit., p. 64.

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