‘It changed 20th-century art’: revisiting Robert Frank’s The Americans – in pictures

Frank’s iconic photo book exposed the racism, loneliness and consumer culture lurking behind the American dream. It still resonates today

Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey

The Americans is one of the most influential and enduring works of US photography. Robert Frank’s exacting vision, distinct style and poetic insight changed the course of 20th-century art and influenced generations of photographers. First published in France in 1958, the iconic book is being released to mark the centennial of Frank’s birth and an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Americans is available to purchase via Aperture

City fathers, Hoboken, New Jersey

Sarah Meister, executive director at Aperture, writes: ‘Part of what makes the Americans so noteworthy is the rhythm and poetry of its sequence. This second image deftly substitutes the obscured women in the window of the first for a suite of imperious, yet backward-looking ‘city fathers’, and decorative bunting in lieu of the American flag. Frank keeps us, as viewers, at a low angle and removed from both, heightening our attention to these differences’

Public park, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Frank set out on a 10,000-mile road trip, capturing his subjects with a poetic and critical eye. His work unveiled facets of American life that had previously gone unacknowledged or uncelebrated: confronting its audience with the superficial allure of Hollywood or an underbelly of racial inequality and injustice. Taken as a whole, The Americans captures the aspirations and the stark reality of the American dream

Drug store, Detroit

Sarah Meister: ‘Frank’s point of view – at once startling and tenacious – is imbued with humanity and lyricism, painting a searing portrait of a nation full of promise and contradiction’

Belle Isle, Detroit

Frank was personally involved in every step of the design and production of the original book

Savannah, Georgia

Jack Kerouac wrote in the book’s introduction: ‘Whether ’tis the milk of human kindness, Shakespeare meant, makes no difference when you look at these pictures. Better than a show’

Funeral, St Helena, South Carolina

Kerouac: ‘As American a picture – the faces don’t editorialise or criticise or say anything but: “This is the way we are in real life and if you don’t like it I don’t know anything about it ’cause I’m living my own life my way, and may God bless us all mebbe … if we deserve it”’

Butte, Montana

Jack Kerouac: ‘Leaning, peering out the right front window of Old Paw’s car on a Sunday’

Rodeo, New York City

Meister: ‘In the mid-1950s Frank was a stranger travelling in a strange land, his camera often drawn to those similarly positioned as outsiders. Somehow this cowboy had made his way to the streets of New York City, where Frank found him lighting a cigarette, leaning against a trash can as if it were a corral’

Ranch market, Hollywood

Meister: ‘Frank understood that his photographs of diners, jukeboxes, drive-ins, televisions, highways and assembly lines represented America as clearly, and perhaps with more nuance, than the stars and stripes ever could. His attentiveness to the complexity of his adopted home, including the realities of racism, loneliness, class divides and consumer culture, is one reason the book continues to resonate with audiences today’

Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Kerouac: ‘What a poem this is. What poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every grey mysterious detail, the grey film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind’

Cafe, Beaufort, South Carolina

Kerouac: ‘Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America on to film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world’