If there were two anthologies photographic moments in the fifties in the U.S. were the exhibition THE FAMILY OF MAN at the MOMA in NY cured by Edward Steichen and the other was a small book called THE AMERICANS which was published in Paris made from a Guggenheim Fellowship. Fifty years after those releases, today few people remember to look "politically correct" THE FAMILY OF MAN and everyone rushes to celebrate the half century of the fundamental work of Swiss Robert Frank. His gaze is as contemporary today as then. (LIC)
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(Text taken from http://basico3.organizacionnelsongarrido.com/?p=3)
Robert Frank: subjective documentary photography.
When, in 1959, published in USA Robert Frank's book The Americans, American critics reacted bravely against both; book and author. Frank's irreverent attitude, embodied in images seen as poorly framed, poorly lit and was totally confused against the aesthetic dominant in the picture until then. Frank's work did not meet the aesthetic requirements to be considered in photography for personal expression, but also in documentary photography, as its lack of preciousness and its deliberate disregard for the rules that a good photograph must meet, him away entirely on the successful work of his predecessors (such as Ansel Adams and Eugene Smith, to name just two American examples).
What restrained the understanding of those critics was that, in The Americans, Robert Frank opened a new style of documentary photography, documentary photography subjective, which overflowed parameters for analysis and assessment of existing photographic image so far. The project was conducted under the sponsorship of the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship for the first time granted to a non-American. The application Frank explained, it is making "a visual project of such forcefulness that eliminate any explanation" an authentic contemporary document . For two years, 1956 to 1958, Frank, armed with a Leica 35 mm., He traveled around the country. His interest was not the majesty of the landscape that had already attracted photographers like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, but the daily life of the United States: the cafes, bars a the side of the road, buses, elevators, these sites devoid of epic and epic which consume most of our lives. The product was a book first published in France in 1958 under the title Les Americains. One piece, armed with 83 photographs, where each image is related to the other and is part of a discourse based on sensible intuition of reality. 
diligent with sensitivity and ability to describe, Frank redefines the relationship between the way up the photograph and the content is expressed, by the way and get subjetivice own life in a new way of expression. Each Photography is extremely narrative, but their stories are not linear or predictable, they are mirrors that reflect a lot of similar situations, anonymous, intimate, multiple windows of the existing realities and not a single reality authoritatively imposed. The variety of styles and shapes on the book was something innovative for its time. Frank got rid of all formal recommendations and academic demands of the moment of photography. There blurry pictures, but there are also focused, some are casual, but others seem exquisitely arranged, a rigorous compositions are, in other reigns the de-composition, there are dense, full, or wide open spaces and vast empty, chopped contrapicado and the most rigorous frontal . The book becomes unpredictable, one can not guess what will come after each photo. 
In the heyday of the American way of life, Robert Frank produced an antipro able to convey the dark side of U.S. reality more banal, more human and more everyday ordinary people, those people at the same time outside and surrounded by an economic boom, household appliances and television sweetened, immersed in the great and crafty show that media and government as a reality imposed on the entire nation. The work is framed chronologically in the '50s, but has the spirit of transgression in the '60s, questioning the values \u200b\u200bof American progress and shows the heterogeneity of a country that insisted on presenting itself as a large homogenous mass. The Americans reveals the deep tensions between the strata of American society: blacks mounted on the back of the bus - remember that it was not until the '60s that blacks got more equal treatment in American society, as the right to enter universities or sit next to whites, for example, the Latino culture played in a forgotten bar in the road transvestites on the edge of the street in a city that refused to see them. 
All work has a tinge of sadness, melancholy, loneliness, bitterness, emotions that have so far not found a place in the portrait of a country. However, it may be too - that's how I see it - as a great poem . Not an epic, but the deep and lonely soul special poetry and unobserved. That is the key to The Americans: the people who appear portrayed here is not being observed, therefore, does not act, no makeup, no combs, no smiles. Robert Frank accomplished photographer entered as invisible in the privacy of every human being and to portray it as it is, in the grand scale of its very existence. As he said: "Looking out into trying to look" His way of looking at reality through photography, without pose, away from what is considered art at that time - the rigorous composition, the system areas, the use of large sizes - made him become a pillar of the great subjectivity of photography that would ensue from the '60s. 
In the application to the Guggenheim, Frank attempted to define his photographic project by appealing to the definition of poetry by his friend Jack Kerouac, Beat poet: "the discipline of naming things directly, purely, in particular, not abstractions, nor explanations ..." This summed up their thinking and currents that animated him: so-called Beat Generation, poets out of formality, a hotbed of future hippie ideology, depositors weary of centuries of rules and commitments; transgressors rebels. Frank From the time they take slow, that let things happen without intervening, without violence; that melancholy, that I leave, that contempt for the goals set in advance. Indeed, it is Kerouac who performs the prologue of the first American edition of the work in 1959. 
For other photographers, it is necessary to trace the route to Weegee, the great reporter of the '30s, a pioneer in photographing openly inconsistencies of American society, with a hard style and ironic. Other influences, such as Bill Brandt with his work on the streets of London (1938), and the portraits on the streets of New York made by Walker Evans in the same year, are performed by Frank with his very personal style. With The Americans Robert Frank opens the door for contemporary photography: the realm of the subjective, the way subordinate to the intimate expression of the photographer. 
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