Frank's noncommercial work started to get noticed. In 1954, he applied for a Guggenheim fellowship proposing to create an "observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States." Photographic legends Walker Evans and Edward Steichen wrote references. Frank got the grant, bought a used Ford and headed out.
"I was absolutely free just to turn left or turn right without knowing what I would find."
He set off in June 1955. His first stops were in Pennsylvania and Ohio, then Michigan, where he was allowed to photograph inside Ford's River Rouge plant in Dearborn.
"It was so hot and the noise and the machines. And then the workers would see me and for some reason they all started to scream. [It was] just a release," Frank laughs.
His photograph of the factory is a grainy blur: two lines of men at work, blacks and whites side-by-side and facing each other across the assembly line that runs up the middle of the picture.
There were some hairy moments. In Arkansas, Frank was stopped by state police "for no other reason than that he was a foreign-looking person driving an older car," Greenough says. "When the police stopped him, he didn't speak with a good southern accent." He was jailed and interrogated for several hours.
"He described it as one of the most terrifying experiences of his trip," she says.
Frank was a foreigner with a bunch of cameras at the height of the Cold War. Police thought he was a spy. In a way, he was.
During his trip, Frank shot 767 rolls of film yielding about 27,000 images. He edited that down to about 1,000 work prints, spread them across the floor of his studio and tacked them to the walls for a final edit. Out of a year and a half of work, Frank chose just 83 images.
Frank doesn't like to go back and analyze them. But he will talk about one of his favorites, a private moment on a hill in San Francisco. At the top of the frame is a broad gray sky; below are the city's hills and houses in stark white. In the foreground, sitting on a hill overlooking the scene, is a couple, the man turned to the camera with an angry scowl on his face. The invisible photographer had been caught.
"All I could do is just stand there with my camera and just keep photographing, but a little bit away from him so he could think and accept that maybe I photographed the panorama of the city," Frank remembers.
"Those are the difficult moments every photographer has to get over and get away with it and not be discouraged," he says. "Because if one is sensitive, it has an effect on you. So maybe it's better not to be sensitive as a photographer and just go on. Many photographers today have that but I never had that. I think it's nice to be sensitive as a photographer and maybe it's harder."
Frank rarely spoke to his subjects; he chose to point, shoot and move along. His pictures, however, eventually struck an emotional chord. The Americans became a hit as the '50s gave way to the '60s. Americans began to see his photographs as relevant — even prescient. But by then, Frank had already moved on. The year The Americans came out, he set aside still photography and made his first film.
Images from Robert Frank
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