Reflection on The Americans

Recently, my Advanced Topics in Studio Art class went to see the exhibition of Robert Frank’s The Americans at the National Gallery of Art. Unfortunately I was unable to attend, but managed to view the exhibition on my own. Frank’s photographs, taken over a two year period all around the United States, is a reflection on the lives of Americans in the mid-50s. He managed to edit 27,000 images into 83 to place in his book. He creates sequences of these images, finding similarities within the photographs, playing with the subject matter and words. These sequences completely disregard time or location of the photograph, but instead focus on how the sequences fit together.

In the exhibit, the photographs are sequenced as they are in the book. This was crucial to exhibit – if the photographs were arranged in a different order, it would no longer be The Americans. It would become a group of photographs taken in the 1950s of ordinary people doing ordinary things. Frank groups these photographs so that the ordinary people he sequences together suddenly become extraordinary.

Frank may not be the best technical photographer, but his sequences of images in The Americans turn him into a genius artist. He sheds a different light on the world around us, forcing the viewer to take a closer look at what they would normally overlook. In this way, the ordinary becomes a new experience to the viewer. Frank forces the viewer to take on the role of a bystander because the viewer is simply looking at the photographs, but at the same time, the viewer is somewhat immersed in the photographs. The exhibition allows the viewer to admire multiple images at once, while the actual book forces them to take in each image one at a time.