+ MoMA
In a country that was not his own, Frank assumed the unique position of an outsider and voyeur who unobtrusively captured the tensions of the geographic, economic, racial, and religious diversity of the US. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954, he made numerous cross-country car trips over a period of 10 months, ultimately logging 10,000 miles. He used a handheld camera to present a picture of the US that was provocatively out of sync with the insistent optimism that often characterized Americans’ postwar sense of self. The 83 photographs comprising The Americans record cars, jukeboxes, bureaucracy, leisure, youth culture, high society, crowded urban streets, desolate open plains, politics, race, and religion. Frank captured the nation as a messy corpus, never privileging city or country, black or white, Jew or Christian, rich or poor. In the wake of this achievement, subsequent generations of photographers, beginning with Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, have paid close attention to his example.
MoMA
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