Not a human in sight, though the imprint of human activity could hardly be more pronounced: a row of receding roofs and a line of cars on a cloth-gray street, at the end of which, in softer, pencilled tones, come the disfigured slopes of a copper mine. Here, for example, is Butte, which Frank reached in May, 1956. Inside every fat volume, of course, a thin one is signalling quietly to get out, and, tucked away inside this hulk, not even starting until page 209, is the source of the fuss: the original pictures, of a burnished black-and-white, in all their roaring silence.
Before that, it showed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and, back in January, at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, where Sarah Greenough, the senior curator of photographs, put together the exhibition and edited the catalogue-a beast of a book, more than five hundred pages long, stacked with a dozen essays, reproductions of letters and contact sheets, early Frank, late Frank, and, most helpfully, a map. Back on the walls again, not of his apartment-at eighty-four, he divides his time between New York and Nova Scotia-but of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where “Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ ” runs from September 22nd through January 3rd. By then, the book was out of print.Īnd now look at it. The final count, from all those months on the road, was eighty-three pictures: enough for a slim book, which was published in November, 1958, in Paris, as “Les Américains,” and here, in January, 1960, as “The Americans.” For his pains, Frank was paid two hundred dollars in advance, a sum that rose to just over eight hundred and seventeen dollars by the end of the year. Then there were contact sheets to print and mark up from those, he made a thousand work prints, which were tacked to the walls of his apartment on Third Avenue, near Tenth Street, or laid flat on the floor for closer inspection, before being whittled down to a hundred. There were more than seven hundred and sixty rolls of film to develop: an impressive tally, even to snap-happy profligates of the digital age. In fact, he took around twenty-seven thousand. To the earliest viewers of “The Americans,” he was the enemy within. Luckily, he’d taken a few photographs along the way. It had been a year, more or less, since he embarked, and there was much to reflect upon. From there, it was a deep curve, though a swift one, through Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa to Chicago, where he turned south at last, by early June, Frank and his Ford Business, his partner for ten thousand miles, were back in New York. Alone again, he made the trip back, going via Reno and Salt Lake City, then pushing north on U.S. They stayed on the Pacific Coast until May of the following year, when Mary and the children returned to New York. Together, they went west, arriving in Los Angeles in the nick of Christmastime. Petersburg, and then struck out on a long, diversionary loop to New Orleans, and thence to Houston, for a rendezvous with his wife, Mary, and their two children, Pablo and Andrea. Later that summer, he headed south to Savannah, and, with the coming of fall, set off from Miami Beach to St. From there, Frank drove by himself to Detroit, where he visited the Ford River Rouge plant, in Dearborn, as if taking the coupe home to see its family. It was a Ford Business Coupe, five years old, sold by Ben Schultz, of New York. In June, 1955, Robert Frank bought a car.