104
TROLLEY—NEW ORLEANS by Robert Frank
Uncomfortable truths tend to carry conse quences for
the teller. When Robert Frank’s book The Americans was re-
leased, Practical Photography magazine dismissed the Swiss-
born photographer’s work as a collection of “meaningless
blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and gen-
eral sloppiness.” The book’s 83 images were taken as Frank
crisscrossed the U.S. on several road trips in the mid-1950s,
and they captured a country on the cusp of change: rig-
idly segregated but with the civil rights movement stirring,
rooted in family and rural tradition yet moving headlong
into the anonymity of urban life.
Nowhere is this tension higher than in Trol l e y —N e w
Orleans, a fleeting moment that conveys the brutal social
order of postwar America. The picture, shot a few weeks be-
fore Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Mont-
gomery, Ala., was unplanned. Frank was shooting a street
parade when he saw the trolley passing. Spinning around,
Frank raised his camera and shot just before the trolley
disappeared from view. The picture was used on the cover
of early editions of The Americans, fueling criticism that the
work was anti-American. Of course Frank—who became
a U.S. citizen in 1963, five years after The Americans was
published—simply saw his adopted country as it was, not as
it imagined itself to be. More than half a century later, that
candor has made The Americans a monument of documenta-
ry and street photography. Frank’s loose and subjective style
liberated the form from the conventions of photojournalism
established by life magazine, which he dismissed as “god-
damned stories with a beginning and an end.”