<note><![CDATA[© Robert Frank, courtesy of Pace / MacGill Gallery, New York]]></note>
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<title><![CDATA[The Americans]]></title>
<title2><![CDATA[<br>1958 (detail)]]></title2>
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<body><![CDATA[With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank travelled across America between April 1955 and June 1956, shooting 687 rolls of film, producing almost 25,000 images. His aim was to show the underbelly of the American Dream, and, as he wrote in 1958, the year of publication, ΓÇ£criticism can come out of loveΓÇ¥. The project was mammoth. ΓÇ£I go into post offices, Woolworths,<br>10-cent shops, bus stations. I sleep in cheap hotels. Around seven in the morning I got to a nearby bar. I work all the time. I donΓÇÖt speak much. I try not to be seen.ΓÇ¥ This was America seen through detached, foreign eyes. Frank, like the beat poets and writers, showed another America from the commercialised, uniform blandness the decade projected. Here, the country was full of desolation and violence, poverty and racism, but also happiness and heart. By June 1957 he had edited the work down to 83 photos from his road trip. The book was a sequence of non-linear photographs of black motorcycle gangs, shining jukeboxes, hollow patriotism and deep prejudice. But the images are uncertain. Cowboys in Gallup, New Mexico, could be scowling in aggressive confrontation or staring ahead in isolated loneliness. FiguresΓÇÖ backs are often turned to the camera, or their faces are glimpsed from the side or an obtuse angle. Such transitory images reflect the quick glances of life, the ambiguities of society.]]></body>
