Finding Robert Frank

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On a recent Sunday at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, a visitor to “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans,” the current exhibition centered around the lyrical photojournalism project, could be overheard explaining a bit of photo history to his two young children. “Hey, guys. This is how we used to do it,” he said, pointing to a contact sheet on display. “We would take the pictures on this stuff called film, and then you could develop them all on one sheet like this, called a contact sheet.” His boy, maybe 8, gazed up at it while his younger daughter, maybe 5, busied herself with an iPhone.

In an era when almost all of us go about our daily lives armed with cameras small enough to tuck into a breast pocket, film costs have been done away with, and an image can be shot, downloaded, enhanced, and published to an audience of (potential) millions within minutes, Frank’s trademark stealth — his images captured between rapidly moving passers-by, say — doesn’t have as much impact.

Likewise, viewers who consider the black-and-white photographs in his meditation on America, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the same way we view our daily overdose of digital imagery, or even the more professionally composed work available in museums or the media, will also miss their impact, and real, enduring worth.

Frank’s work may be radical for its oft-cited “off-kilter” approach, which marked a major departure from the carefully composed work of his predecessors, but it endures for the stories it tells — about America, Americans, and humanity in general — many of which have yet to find their denouement. Though individual images may have been dashed off, the stories they tell, alone or in groups, were very carefully considered, with Frank having selected and carefully arranged the 83 included images from an initial trove of 767 rolls of film, or 27,000-some frames.

A German Jew born in Switzerland and stripped of his German citizenship during World War II, Frank, who immigrated to the United States in 1947 at the age of 22, was criticized for the depiction of the United States he presented in The Americans, which was originally published in France in 1958. Crossing the country on a Beat-inspired, Kerouac-ian road trip, armed only with his 35mm Leica, he captured spaces seldom seen in the media — taprooms, funeral parlors — and addressed issues Americans were loath to tackle head-on, especially in the heady, patriotic days after the war, such as poverty and racism.

Now, 50 years later, another curious European has followed in Frank’s literal footsteps — and in the more figurative ones of predecessors such as Alexis de Tocqueville — to re-create portions of the original journey.

Philippe Séclier, a Paris-based journalist with a long interest in American culture and photography, hit the road with nothing but a digital video camera in 2005, traveling a total of 15,000 miles over two and a half years, visiting many of the sites of Frank’s images and shooting some 70 hours of footage. The result, titled An American Journey, will be shown through Oct. 6 at Film Forum in New York, along with a short by another American master: Helen Leavitt’s In the Streets, created with James Agee and Janice Loeb.

Like Frank, Séclier employs his outsider’s perspective to expose some aspects of the American condition that some of us would prefer to pretend didn’t exist, though he tells ARTINFO it was not necessarily his intention to do so. In a trip to New Orleans, the site of Frank’s telling, technically exceptional shot of a segregated trolley car, for example, Séclier finds a city racked by a national disaster that wiped out entire neighborhoods that were arguably still segregated, though by socioeconomic status rather than by law.