In 2009, the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Robert Frank’s foundational photography book “The Americans” with an exhibit of the volume’s eighty-three images. It was the first time that the project had been exhibited in New York. At the time, Jason Eskenazi, a practicing photographer himself, was working as security guard at the Met. He left the job a few months after the show opened, but first he decided to turn the occasion of the Frank exhibit into an opportunity for intensive study. He would arrive early to work, hover to listen in on gallery talks, and strike deals with other guards to allow him more rotations guarding the Frank exhibition. He also noticed that many photographers he recognized were coming to see the show, and he began asking each of them to describe which of Frank’s photographs was their favorite. After leaving the museum, Eskenazi continued to send out the question to other prominent photographers, collecting responses from hundreds of photographers in all. Their thoughtful, illuminating comments on Frank's work are compiled in the book “The Americans List,” whose second edition was recently released. “ 'The Americans' is probably the one book that connects more photographers than any other,” Eskenazi writes. "I discovered that many of the answers revealed much more about the photographers themselves." Here are some of our favorite responses to three of the book’s indelible images:_
What drew me to Robert Frank’s work was the eerie, sometimes crazy idea that, in many of his pictures of America, he was living out not only his own life but mine. The photograph “Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey” cuts closest. Let me describe it, though I shouldn’t have to, since it is the very first picture in the book. There are two women standing in separate windows of what appears to be an apartment building. One of the women, her face obscured by the half-drawn window shade and shadow, is wearing an unstylish dress, even for that time (short-sleeved, so you think it’s warm), while the other woman, her face wholly obscured by an American flag, is wearing what appears to be a woollen coat. She is thin, looks to be chilled. Both of them—to use a trite phrase—seem burdened by the past.
You see, all through my life—as a kid growing up in the inner city, and as a photographer, sometime social worker, occasional protester—I’ve seen the people in this photo, seen them again and again, thousands of times, looking out warily, oftentimes directly at me, appearing slight and harmless at first, not moving. But when you look back the people are still standing there, judgmental and afraid.—Eugene Richards
This photo has come back around to being my favorite now, after I spent ten years covering the Middle East and South Asia. Maybe because it reminds me of the lattice-covered balconies where women in many Muslim countries view religious parades or funerals. Faces obstructed to the viewer, they stand in their homes, sometimes getting the best view. Their life is the life of the ultimate voyeur. A place from which women of the fifties in the U.S. were slowly escaping. But the bricks, the dress on hardworking arms, the windows—two of many, all alike—are America. Lost with pride.—Andrea Bruce
This photo means so many different things all at once, like a Rorschach test. The black woman holding the baby is neither visibly happy nor sad. The strength of the picture is in Frank’s refusal to guide the viewer, and in the subject’s refusal to guide us, too. It’s a photo made in turbulent times, and is ultimately so much more powerful because of its subtlety. The baby almost floats, ghostly, unknowing.—Glenna Gordon
This is the image that stuck with me most many years after seeing Frank’s book. The white baby is central to the overwhelming whiteness of the image—everything is milky but the woman’s skin, and both figures seem frozen in these roles. I see this sense of privilege in the child’s eyes, and it cuts to some core, sick emotions connected with race in America that I think are still with us today.—Carolyn Drake
This photograph captures the essence of racism and servitude in America for all time. The contrast between the expression of cold entitlement on the very white baby’s face and the calm resignation of the black nurse who is holding her only amplifies the great difference in their skin color and positions in life. In the original printing of “The Americans,” the content in this photograph is enhanced by the blown-out whiteness of everything in the frame except the black nurse’s face. When I first saw this photograph, as a young woman who wanted to be a documentary photographer, I recognized the power that great emotional content in photography could have. This is a great photograph that still inspires me because it is the quintessential photographic statement about race and class in this country.—Mary Ellen Mark
The photograph of Robert’s that was a significant turning point for me is “Canal Street—New Orleans.” This image had always puzzled me, as if it were saying, “See this undifferentiated mass of pedestrians? It’s worthy of an image.” But why? I asked myself dozens of times as I paged through “The Americans.” Why did Robert make this photograph? What was he thinking? Why did he use it in the book when it seems so generalized? Over time, I came to realize that the reasons for making a photograph and what it may mean to you later are two different things, and what it means to somebody else is yet another. This image came to life for me years after I first puzzled about it, when I was undertaking a transformation in my own work and realized that Robert had planted a seed that was then sprouting.—Joel Meyerowitz
The picture’s a tour de force—photographic instinct operating at the purest level. No mere human could actually see that passing parade in all its variety (and meaning) coursing in front of the camera. So the picture records both a brilliant act of intuition as well as complex cultural fact. More so than in many of the photographs in the book, which effectively confirm (but always gracefully) something that Frank has effectively spotted and noted with a somewhat-conscious mind—e.g., a black nurse with a white baby—here, the preconscious seizes control, resulting in a picture through which past, present, and future roil, a poetic state that only photography can (rarely) express.—Tod Papageorge
So much of Frank’s book captures and describes the plasma of the country that he travelled through with a camera. But this image captures the many protagonists that were moving through and living in that space. Like the work of Saul Steinberg, and a bit like Frank’s cover illustration for the original edition of “The Americans,” this image shows all these unique lives marching along on their private paths, nearly colliding, in public space. I try again and again to make overpopulated pictures with no clear protagonist or obvious narrative. I think about many of Winogrand’s and Klein’s busy street pictures. I love the energy and the joy of that work. But Frank’s “Canal Street—New Orleans” is a different thing. It doesn’t traffic in the sexual energy that is high in those other images. The picture just stops it all . . . turns it into a monumental frieze . . . and tells me a different story every time I look at it.—Gus Powell
Responses were drawn from "The Americans List II," by Jason Eskenazi, which is out now from Red Hook Editions.
