The Unhappy Many
Gutierrez, Donald
THE AMERICANS: Photographs by Robert Frank, introduction by Jack Kerouac. Grove Press. 1959. vi. 83 plates. $7.50. Shortly before Joe Hill was executed by the state of Utah, he requested...
...That state, he said, he would not want to be found dead in...
...A quiet, lyrical moment like "Beaufort, South Carolina" is one example...
...Frank's camera has caught Americans in offguard moments—a choice way to see what persons who are subjected to an ethos of production and distribution for profits really look like...
...It is, instead, a place of impetus without direction, of activity without adequate psychic meaning, of loneliness and lethargy rather than privacy and a liberated personal life...
...THE AMERICANS: Photographs by Robert Frank, introduction by Jack Kerouac...
...The mark of a good civilization, however, is that through its institutions it transforms this instinctual will to exist into an elaborate sense of beauty and meanillg...
...To know that it does exist, one need simply go to any Greyhound depot and find he has missed his bus, or spend an hour in Times Square...
...These images might not fully explain why Americans annually consume sixty-billion tranquillizers or produce six-hundred-million gallons of liquor but they lend credence to such statistics...
...The enormous energy and activity of American life implicit in "Assembly line" and "Convention hall" represent, if inadequately, the restlessness and mobility which, properly directed, might take the country along a better course...
...These photographs reveal Americans looking bored, lonely, waiting (for nothing), crowded amidst the rubbish of a high-geared industrial society, thrown together in incongruous relationships and settings...
...There is a quality of "EVERYTHING-ness" in Frank's America...
...One's first response to The Americans, a book of photographs by Robert Frank (with an introduction by Jack Kerouac), is to extend Hill's sentiments to the whole country...
...there is justification for some of the enthusiasm in Kerouac's introduction...
...America possesses a sort of double life—a vast commercial squalor on the one hand and an actual physical and potential cultural beauty on the other...
...Americans, like any people engulfed in a corrupt social order, go on liv-ing, if only by inertia...
...A few shots of the American jazz and painting worlds might have dramatized this potential...
...However, the view is not entirely gray...
...Photograph after photograph urge these claims—the stark save-money signs of gas stations in the country which seem like ironic cries for help, department stores beseeching YOU to remember your dead loved ones by buying a 69-cent white plastic-foam cross, neon-lit cowboy bars, lost young lovers in Chattanooga, couples sitting in shiny cars watching drive-in movies, people not knowing what to do with themselves when they are confronted by the week end—the list could be extended...
...Frank's America does not reach this mark...
...Frank has made visible the first of these Americas which myriad power and propaganda blocs from the NAM to The Saturday Evening Post pretend does not even exist...
...Here, in a country capable of vastly enlarging and beautifying the material life of its people, is a culture that not only produces an avalanche of dime-store trivialities but has succeeded in conditioning the population to accept them...
...Shortly before Joe Hill was executed by the state of Utah, he requested that his ashes be scattered in every state of the union, except Utah...
Vol. 8 • September 1961 • No. 4
