The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Frank · a book of eighty-three black and white photographs in sequence, each captioned by its place, sometimes by its subject · made on journeys across the United States under a Guggenheim Fellowship, on a 35mm Leica, in available light · first published in Paris by Robert Delpire in 1958 as Les Américains, and in New York by Grove Press in 1959 as The Americans, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac · the unit scored is the book as a sequence, read in its 1959 form; single prints, exhibition prints and contact sheets are context
Mode
Documentary photography turned to a personal, oblique sequence: a poem of fragments rather than a picture essay
Mythos
The national myth of the road, the flag and the car, built as a journey across the continent and turned against itself: a parade the viewer cannot see at the start, a family still travelling at the end
Phase
Made in the 1950s on journeys across the United States; published in Paris in 1958 and in New York in 1959; read in the 1959 form, sixty-seven years on
Presentation
Eighty-three black and white photographs from 35mm negatives, one sequence in a book, each captioned only by its place, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac
Register
Melancholy and cold grief, with comedy and the absurd; long passages of plain, sullen seeing broken by sudden drops into elegy
Scale
A continent’s regions, classes, races and ceremonies, held picture by picture in single frames of strangers
Governing Proposition
Robert Frank, a Swiss photographer settled in New York, crossed the United States with a 35mm camera and made from what he saw a book of eighty-three photographs with no text but the names of places. The wager of the book is that a sequence of oblique, grainy, unconsoled pictures, taken in passing from a car, a counter stool or the edge of a crowd, can say what a picture essay with captions and a story cannot: that a country at the height of its prosperity is a country of people alone in public, that its rites are hollow, its colour line in plain sight, and its sacred moved into the car, the jukebox and the screen.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924 and settled in New York in 1947. Under a Guggenheim Fellowship he made journeys across the United States with a 35mm Leica, working in available light, and from the many thousands of frames he exposed he chose eighty-three. The book was first published in Paris by Robert Delpire in 1958 as Les Américains, and in New York by Grove Press in 1959 as The Americans, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. Frank died in 2019.
The work scored is the book, and the book as a sequence. Eighty-three black and white photographs, each captioned only by a place and sometimes a subject: “Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey”, “Trolley, New Orleans”, “U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas”. The single prints, the exhibition prints and the contact sheets are context and evidence, and are not scored; where a single picture is weighed, it is weighed as a place in the order. The eighty-three images and their sequence stand across editions, and the 1959 form is the one read.
The two first editions differ in what surrounds the pictures. The Paris edition set texts by other writers about America beside the plates; the American edition gave the pictures with nothing but their places, and an introduction. The difference is the clearest test of what the book’s form knows. Beside an essay, the same images become illustrations of a thesis about a country; alone, in order, with a place name each, they have to be read the way a poem of fragments is read, one picture answering another across pages, with no voice to say what to feel.
Movement II
The book opens on a brick front with two windows. In one a woman’s face is hidden by the flag hung across it; in the other a woman stands in shadow. A parade is passing below, and the viewer never sees it. The nation is a cloth over its people, and the picture states the book’s manner in its first frame: the meaning sits at the edge, in the faces cut by the window frames and the flag between them, and nothing is explained.
That manner is the departure. Behind the book stands Walker Evans’s American Photographs, the sequenced book of plain American places and faces, which stands at 8.6; around it stood The Family of Man and the picture essay of the weeklies, captioned, narrated and reassuring, and Cartier-Bresson’s well composed decisive moment. Frank kept Evans’s sequence and refused the rest: grain, blur, tilted horizons, figures cut by the frame, pictures taken from the hip or from a car, and no text. The book was attacked in the American photographic press as sloppy and as anti-American, and its maker soon turned from the still photograph to film. Evans had laid the form, and William Klein’s New York book of 1956 was taking a parallel turn, and The Swerve stands at 8.9 rather than higher.
The making is a matter of speed and of order. Framing in available light at the pace of a street; grain, blur and dim interiors used as tone; the timing of a glance in a crowd. Some single plates are near misses of exposure and focus that the book’s manner absorbs rather than requires, and the charge of sloppiness was right about them and wrong about the method. The highest skill is the sequencing, in which pictures from different states answer one another across pages, and on it The Made stands at 8.7 and The Living Form at 8.9: as separate prints the pictures are strong single images, and many keep much of their force alone, but what the book knows it knows only in order.
Movement III
A trolley car passes, its windows in a row, and each window holds a passenger: white in front, Black behind. The law of the land is a seating plan, and the picture shows it without a word of comment. In Charleston, South Carolina, a Black nurse holds a white infant. At St. Helena, Black mourners stand beside their cars. The colour line was in plain sight and largely unshown in the picture press of the day, and the book shows it as a fact of public space, not as a cause.
What the book discloses can be stated. Postwar America, at the height of its prosperity and confidence, is a country of people alone in public: the elevator girl in Miami Beach staring past her passengers, the diners in a restaurant on U.S. 1 outside Columbia beneath a television no one watches. Its civic rites are hollow: at a political rally in Chicago a tuba and its bunting stand where a face should be. Its sacred has moved into the car, the jukebox and the screen. These are meanings, and they hold; but much of the book’s force is a mood of melancholy, its truths are fewer than its pictures, and The Unconcealment stands at 8.8.
One law runs through it. A Hollywood premiere, a starlet lit in a crowd of blurred faces, and the funeral at St. Helena, mourners standing apart in the heat, are as far apart as the book goes, and they are seen the same way: an oblique, unconsoled gaze at people held apart from one another inside the nation’s rites, from the edge, in passing. The same law holds a cowboy in New York, an assembly line in Detroit and a family in a car in Texas, across comedy, the absurd and grief. A few plates are slack where it has not taken hold, and the plan of the whole is felt more than shown; The Inner Law stands at 8.9.
Movement IV
Between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona, a body lies under a blanket beside the highway. A few pages away, at Long Beach, California, a car stands under a cover, shrouded as the body is. The car becomes the country’s coffin and its shrine. The rhymes of this kind are where the book cannot lose a plate: the funeral at St. Helena answers the crosses on the scene of a highway accident on U.S. 91 in Idaho, and the jukebox answers the television. The middle of the sequence yields more: a bar or a street could often be exchanged for another of its kind, and The Inevitable stands at 8.2.
Elevation in the book is of a cold and grieving kind. The body on U.S. 66, the mourners at St. Helena standing apart beside their cars, the night highway of U.S. 285 in New Mexico running into the dark, the crosses on U.S. 91, and the flag at Jay, New York, on the Fourth of July, hung translucent over the street like a veil: these rise past observation into elegy. Between them lie bars, counters, lobbies and parking lots, a register kept low on purpose, so that the height comes as a sudden drop into grief. It reaches terror and pity, at several true summits, and The Sublime stands at 8.3.
The myth is the nation’s own, and it is built. The road across the continent, the stranger’s journey through the land, the flag, the car, the frontier town: the myth of freedom and arrival is the book’s structure, and each plate is a station on the journey, at a named place on a named road. It is built largely by inversion, a parade unseen, a car for a coffin, crosses for milestones, and some plates stand outside it as plain report. The Archetypal Deep stands at 8.5, at the line of the Epochal Gate.
Movement V
The last plate is Frank’s own family: his wife and child in a car at the side of the road, waiting, the journey not ended. The book that opened on a parade nobody could see closes on a family nowhere arrived. Kerouac’s introduction gives the American welcome in three words, “You got eyes”, and joins the book to the road literature of its years. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the other great portrait of the American road and the dispossessed, stands at 8.6; Kerouac’s On the Road stands at 8.3; Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the poem of America the book most answers, stands at 9.1, above it on all but two axes.
The orders held are many: the state, race, labour, consumption and the machine, the sacred, death, youth and age, the family, held last, and consciousness, the stranger’s eye that is the book’s medium, all in one journey. A book of photographs holds them by juxtaposition and surface, never by interior life, and history appears only as the present instant; The Encompassed stands at 8.2. The reach is wide and named: the street photography of Friedlander, Winogrand and Arbus, shown together in New Documents in 1967, is widely held to descend from it, as is the photobook as an author’s sequence. Pressure on Tradition stands at 9.1, and the book stands above Migrant Mother, at 8.4, chiefly by The Swerve, 8.9 against 7.4, as a sequenced book against a single image should.
The questions stay open: indictment or love song, whose view of race, what relation to the road books; and the sequence yields new rhymes on return, though many returns are to the book’s history and reception. The book survives whole in its eighty-three images and their order, and it has outlived the America it records. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 104.3, and the book stands at 8.7, in Tier IV, held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the sequence, which is where necessity lives in a book of photographs. The frame of the book cannot go: the flag over the hidden faces at Hoboken opens it, the wife and child waiting in the car on U.S. 90 close it, and between them the road is the argument. The flag that returns through it cannot go, nor can the rhymes it sets going: jukebox answering television, the covered car at Long Beach answering the blanketed dead beside U.S. 66, the funeral at St. Helena answering the crosses in Idaho. What holds the axis, with The Encompassed the lowest of the twelve, is the middle: Frank chose eighty-three from many thousands, and a bar or a street could often be exchanged for another of its kind without loss. The plan is necessary; the count is permitted.
Score: 8.2 / 10
What the book brings into the open can be stated, and it has held. Postwar America, at the height of its prosperity and confidence, is a country of people alone in public: the elevator girl in Miami Beach staring past her passengers, the diners in a South Carolina restaurant under a television no one watches. Its civic rites are hollow: the tuba at the Chicago rally where a face should be, the flag hanging over faces at Hoboken. Its colour line is in plain sight: on the New Orleans trolley the white passengers sit in front and the Black passengers behind; in Charleston a Black nurse holds a white infant. These are meanings, not moods, disclosed through image alone. Held below the top because much of the book’s force is a mood of melancholy, and its truths are fewer than its pictures.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Elevation is real, of a cold and grieving kind, and it recurs. The summits: the body under a blanket beside U.S. 66, the mourners at St. Helena standing apart beside their cars, the night highway of U.S. 285 running into the dark, the crosses on U.S. 91, the translucent flag in Jay hung like a veil over the street. These rise past observation into elegy. Between them the book keeps a deliberately low register, bars, counters, lobbies, parking lots, faces at a premiere, and that lowness is the method: the height comes as a sudden drop into grief rather than as sustained grandeur. Several true summits across eighty-three plates, and long passages of plain seeing between them. It reaches terror and pity more than transport, and the axis is indifferent to which.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth built, not alluded to, and the myth is America’s own. The road across the continent, the stranger’s journey through the land, the flag, the car, the frontier town, a cowboy at a rodeo in New York: the myth of national freedom and arrival is the structure of the book, and every plate is a station on it. The journey bears the load. It begins with a parade the viewer cannot see and ends with a family in a car at the side of the road, still travelling, nowhere arrived. The car becomes coffin and shrine, the jukebox an altar, the crosses on the highway the road’s own graves, and the particular stays particular: named towns, never types. Held at the line because much of the archetype is carried by inversion, and some plates stand outside it as plain report.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is double. Behind the book stands Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938), its model of a sequenced book of plain American places and faces; around it stood the humanist photography of the 1950s, Steichen’s The Family of Man (1955), the captioned and reassuring picture essay of the illustrated weeklies, and Cartier-Bresson’s composed decisive moment. The departure: grain, blur, tilted horizons, figures cut by the frame, pictures taken from the hip or the car, and no text to tell the viewer what to feel. The stake was real and the cost was paid: a foreigner’s portrait of America in the Cold War, attacked in the American photographic press as sloppy and as anti-American, and its maker soon turned from the still photograph to film. Held below the top because Evans had laid the form and William Klein’s New York book of 1956 was taking a parallel turn.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Substitute a different form and the work stops knowing most of what it knows. As separate prints on a wall the pictures are strong single images, many of them, but the book’s knowledge is relational: that the flag recurs, that the jukebox and the television answer each other, that a funeral follows a party, that the dead beside U.S. 66 lie a few pages from the shrouded car at Long Beach. The viewer moves from picture to picture without being told, with nothing but a place name, as a reader moves from stanza to stanza. The grain of the 35mm negative, the oblique frame and the available light are themselves the knowledge of a country seen in passing. The Paris edition is the test: the same images, set beside texts about America, become illustrations of an essay. Held below the top because many single plates keep much of their knowledge out of sequence.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise: sixty-eight years from the Paris edition, and the return has been deep and continuous. The questions have stayed open. Is the book an indictment of America or a love song to it, and can it be both? How far is its view of race the work’s own and how far ours? What is its relation to the road literature of the same years, which Kerouac’s introduction joins it to? The selection itself has been studied, and the sequence has been reread plate by plate. Return to the book yields new rhymes across the sequence; a face or a sign seen ten times is seen again differently. Held a step below the summit because many returns are to the book’s history, reception and influence rather than to new depths in the pictures.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of documentary and street photography of the 1950s, in America and beyond. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what a documentary photograph and a photobook could be, from an illustration of a stated subject to a personal, oblique, sequenced poem, in which the photographer’s eye is the instrument and imperfection is meaning. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the American street photography of the next generation, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus, shown together at the Museum of Modern Art in New Documents (1967), is widely held to descend from it; the road picture and the American road book after it; and the photobook as an author’s sequence, now a form of its own. Held at 9.1 rather than higher because the turn was shared with Klein, and Evans had begun it.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The work is a sequence in a book, reprinted in many editions, and the eighty-three images and their order survive entire; differences of crop and printing between editions are small beside the sequence and are charged lightly. Presence: the widest for its span in its medium, a book taught, exhibited and reproduced without break; that presence is weighed at most a tenth, and it is not proof. Fabric: a book has no single fabric to lose. The table gives 8.8 to 9.0 for fifty-five to seventy years, and 9.0 for the widest presence. Its surface is fixed to its moment, the America of the 1950s, and it has already outlived that moment and been read past it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of 35mm black and white photography and of the sequenced book. The making bears the load: framing at speed in available light; the off centre composition in which the meaning sits at the edge, the faces cut by the window frames at Hoboken and the flag between them; grain, blur and dim interiors used as tone; the timing of glance and gesture in a crowd; and the sequencing, perhaps the highest skill in the book, in which pictures from different states are made to answer each other across pages. Held below the top because the single print is often less fully commanded than the elder masters of the medium commanded theirs: some pictures are near misses of exposure and focus that the book’s manner absorbs rather than requires, and the range of means is narrow by choice. The charge of sloppiness was wrong about the method and right about some plates.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the glamour of a Hollywood premiere, a starlet lit in a crowd of blurred faces, and the funeral at St. Helena, mourners standing in the heat beside their cars. They obey one law: an oblique, unconsoled gaze at people held apart from one another inside the nation’s rites, seen from the edge, in passing, without comment. The same law governs a cowboy in New York, a factory line in Detroit, a nurse in Charleston and a family in a car in Texas. The tonal range is wide, from comedy and the absurd to grief, and the territory is a continent’s classes, races, regions and ceremonies; narrowness is not the source of the coherence. Held below the top because a few plates, read singly, are slack where the law has not quite taken hold, and the plan of the whole is felt more than shown.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The orders held are many, and the sequence integrates them: the state, in rallies, city fathers, a navy recruiting office and the flag; race and the colour line; labour, in the Detroit assembly line, the elevator operator, waitresses and workers; consumption and the machine, in cars, jukeboxes, televisions and gas stations; the sacred, in funerals, crosses and St. Francis before the gas station in Los Angeles; death, by the road and in the ground; youth and age; the family, held last, in the car; and consciousness, the stranger’s eye that is the book’s medium. They are held in one structure, the journey, not listed. What holds the axis, with The Inevitable the lowest of the twelve, is the form: a book of photographs holds orders by juxtaposition and surface, never by interior life, and history appears only as the present instant. The figure describes the form.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, then The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Swerve, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.9. A book that turned the documentary photograph from the illustration of a subject into a personal, oblique, sequenced poem, and changed what the next generation of street photographers and the photobook itself became; a sequence that survives whole in its eighty-three images and their order; and one unconsoled gaze held from a Hollywood premiere to a funeral in South Carolina.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Encompassed at 8.2: a plan that is necessary in its frame and its rhymes, but a middle in which a bar or a street could often be exchanged for another of its kind; and a form that holds many orders by juxtaposition and surface, never by interior life, with history only as the present instant. Next above them, The Sublime at 8.3: several true summits of cold grief, between long passages kept low on purpose.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last at the threshold. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 104.3, an average of 8.69 that displays 8.7, three tenths short of the 9.0 the summit requires; the book is held in Tier IV by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the book as a sequence and of its most discussed plates, held less closely across every one of the eighty-three in order. No copy, image or written source was consulted. The work scored is The Americans by Robert Frank, the book of eighty-three black and white photographs first published in Paris by Robert Delpire in 1958 as Les Américains and in New York by Grove Press in 1959 as The Americans, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac; the 1959 form is the one read. The single prints, the exhibition prints and the contact sheets are context and evidence, and are not scored. Walker Evans’s American Photographs, The Family of Man, Cartier-Bresson’s photographs and William Klein’s New York book are named as the field the book entered, not scored. The only words quoted are the captions of places and three words of Kerouac’s introduction. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the years of the journeys, the number of rolls and frames exposed, a division of the sequence into parts each opened by a flag, who chose the texts of the Paris edition, the layout of the American edition’s pages, the magazines in which the book was attacked, changes of crop and printing in later editions, the survival of the prints and negatives, how long the book has been continuously in print, the published study of the contact sheets, whether the photographers of the next generation acknowledged their debt, and Frank’s later work for popular music.