Robert Frank - Les Américains - 1958-1958

This photograph shows the cover of Robert Frank's book The Americans, featuring a minimalist line drawing of a figure and a musical staff. Published for the first time in France in 1958, the work presents a series of black-and-white images capturing the raw and often troubling aspects of American life.

In 1955, Robert Frank crisscrossed the United States. Camera in hand, he immortalizes the fleeting moments of life of Americans he meets along the way: a waitress in a diner, a tattooed man napping, workers at work, a shoeshiner, partygoers, lovers, bikers, the road itself… It is not reportage but a set of notes taken on the fly: Robert Frank gives rise to a new iconography where anonymous faces merge at the edge of sad roads, in urban outgrowths or the emptiness of a vast territory. The places and faces captured on the fly are often blurred, the composition sometimes off-center. The density and depth of the blacks deepen the images, giving them a power of abstraction.

Published in indifference in 1958, this book has become a classic. Regarded as sad or perverse, even subversive, by the American press at the time, its importance has nevertheless continued to grow over the years.

For photographers, critics and the general public have hailed Robert Frank as a true innovator.

This book is nothing like a reportage. It does not tell the journey of a man across the United States. It gathers a sequence of notes taken on the fly by a raw, exposed soul.