‘Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans’ At San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The first section of the exhibition examines the roots of The Americans through Frank's early handmade books, including 40 Photos , 1946, which underscores his eclectic influences and interests, like closeups of sharp-fanged dogs, among other things.

Feeling hemmed in by the conventions of his homeland, Frank, in 1947 at age 23, immigrated to New York. Soon after arriving, he was hired to take photographs for Harper's Bazaar , but quickly tired of the commercial world of high-fashion photography and quit to travel to South America.

He roamed Peru extensively, photographing not monuments or mountains but people. As he later said, he preferred the present and "things that move." From 1949 to 1953, he wandered restlessly between New York City, Paris, Spain, London and Wales, taking pictures of things that were commonplace yet mysterious in each culture. He was drawn to the large Peruvian hats that concealed the faces of wearers; a young Parisian hiding a tulip behind his back as he approached his lady love; sooty Welch miners emerging from work and top-hatted bankers walking briskly along foggy streets, as in "City of London," 1951.

Seeking, as he put it, "a more sustained form of expression" than was possible with a single photograph, he experimented with picture placement in handmade books of photos. Frank came to recognize that two or more photographs placed side-by-side could not only affect each other in subtle ways, but could also assume new meanings. He concluded that a tightly orchestrated sequence of photos, linked by compositional, formal, iconographic and thematic elements, could impart meaning, establish a tone and convey emotion.

Returning to the United States in 1953, Frank won a Guggenheim fellowship "to photograph freely throughout the United States" and "make a broad voluminous picture record of things American." He then embarked on a journey of epic proportions that sought to document a culture, even a civilization. He sought to photograph, he wrote, "the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere."

Driving a used Ford, Frank set out in the fall of 1955 on a nine-month trip that extended across the country and covered 10,000 miles. With no set itinerary, he drove sometimes alone and sometimes with his wife and a son or two. In the summer of 1956 he made some shorter trips, notably to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Everywhere he stopped, he tried to get a sense of the place and the flavor of peoples' lives by visiting ordinary sites — the local five-and-dime, coffee shops, banks, hotels, post offices, parks, cemeteries and bus and train stations. These provided him with opportunities to observe — and photograph — a range of Americans without drawing too much attention to himself.

Frank then spent almost a year organizing his book. This involved developing 767 rolls of film and making contact sheets of them; reviewing more than 27,000 frames and making more than 1,000 rough 8-by-10-inch work prints of the images that intrigued him. After refining the selection, he organized them in very personal sequences and asked Kerouac to write an introduction to the book.

Published first in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959, The Americans was unique among photography books. In 83 photos, often idiosyncratically sequenced, Frank offered a provocative and frequently poignant view of a diverse populace. His pictures looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people anxious about the future, often plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians and caught up in a rapidly rising culture of consumerism. A sense of loneliness and alienation pervades the collection — a far cry from the boosterism and bonhomie of Life and Look magazines, consumed by enthusiasm for postwar prosperity and well-being.

At the same time, Frank found unexpected areas of compassion, generosity and beauty in overlooked corners of American life. In his photographs of time-honored rituals, of diners, cars and even the road itself, he pioneered an immediate, intuitive, off-kilter style that was seemingly as spontaneous as his subjects.

In organizing the photographs in the book, Frank astutely linked them conceptually, formally and thematically, offering a memorable, even haunting, picture of midcentury America. As Kerouac wrote admiringly in his introduction, "The humor, the sadness, the everything -ness and the American-ness of these pictures!"

All 83 photographs from The Americans , often in rarely exhibited vintage prints and in the sequence Frank established, are, of course, the highlights of the exhibition. Each has appeal and offers a narrative challenge. Each section of the book — and the exhibition — starts with an image of the American flag. What follows differs greatly.

The tone for one section is set by its opening two images.

In "Fourth of July — Jay, New York," 1954, an old, patched and worn American flag hangs above the village green as residents celebrate the Declaration of Independence. That document's statement that "all men are created equal" is belied by the next photograph, "Trolley — New Orleans," 1955, in which white folks gazing out from the front of the racially segregated vehicle look confident and prosperous; the blacks in the back appear anxious or dejected. It is a telling image of a racially divided America on the cusp of the Civil Rights movement. Other images that follow build on the theme of inequality and social and economic disparity.

The dignity and patience of African Americans from the deep South is reflected in "Funeral — St Helena, South Carolina," 1955. "Charleston, South Carolina," 1955, depicts a black nanny patiently holding a white child. In "Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana," 1955, a lone black preacher dressed in white kneels to pray adjacent to a white cross next to the wide river. That touching image is linked to a view of a statue of St Francis, holding high a cross and silhouetted against the sky on a desolate street in Los Angeles.

Patriotism even among those left behind is suggested by the women peering from windows of a drab building, their faces partly obscured by a large American flag, in "Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey," 1955. If they represent the powerless and overlooked, power and prominence characterize the pompous, distant politicians standing on a bunting-clad platform in "City Fathers, Hoboken, New Jersey," 1955. As curator Greenough observes, "Their fancy suits, top hats and corsages are as preposterous and pretentious as the apparel of the two previous women was simple and sincere." Goings-on outside the Democratic Convention are recorded in a humorously composed view of a tuba player whose head is obscured by his instrument as he blasts away beneath patriotic bunting in "Political rally, Chicago," 1956.

Elsewhere, an iconic, lithe cowboy — tight jeans, hat and all — leaning against a New York City wire trash basket as he lights a cigarette contrasts with a sullen-looking beauty at a Hollywood movie premiere. Although not in sequence, a prim and trim young couple on a Chattanooga street seem worlds apart from the corpulent, middle-aged GI and his stylishly dressed female companion crossing a street in Savannah, Ga.

Frank also focused on the physical spaces ordinary Americans occupy — hotels, city streets, backyards, pool halls, cafes, gas stations, cemeteries, urinals. For example, a bored young elevator operator is the focus of "Elevator — Miami Beach," 1955. In another photograph, a black man shines the shoes of a white patron surrounded by urinals in the men's room of the Memphis railway station.

Reflecting America's obsession with cars and mobility, Frank included a variety of views on and just off roads in The Americans . This sequence concludes with "U.S. 285, New Mexico," 1955, which offers a compelling view down a Southwest highway that stretches, straight as an arrow, as far as the eye can see. There is something both beautiful and ominous about this image.

"Coupling brilliant insights with rigorous editing, Frank…created a nonnarrative, nonlinear yet distinct, cohesive order in The Americans in which images play with and moderate one another…calling forth new ideas that no single photograph alone could elicit," says Greenough. The Swiss émigré produced an unforgettable, ensemble vision of how he saw America at a crucial juncture in its history.

Published at the height of the Cold War, The Americans , departing from the wholesome, uplifting photographs seen in the popular magazines of the day, was initially reviled, even attacked as anti-American. But in the 1960s, as many of the issues Frank illuminated dominated the public consciousness, his book came to be regarded as both prescient and revolutionary.

Thereafter, Frank drifted off into making avant-garde films with Beat figures like Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Since the 1970s, living in Nova Scotia, he has moved back and forth between still photography and filmmaking. His more recent photographs provide moving accounts of his life and are often composed of multiple images, frequently with words scratched onto negatives or prints. His work has been featured in a number of museum exhibitions.

Now, with "Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans ," he has finally allowed an in-depth examination of his seminal publication, renewing appreciation for its insights into midcentury America and its widespread impact on photography all over the world. This is a show to be studied and savored.

The exhibition is accompanied by two catalogs, with insightful essays by Greenough and others. The 374-page softcover edition sells for $45. The 528-page hardcover edition contains all material in the softcover version, plus added information about Frank's sequencing process, use of contact sheets and archival documents. It is priced at $75.

After closing in San Francisco, the exhibition will be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 22–December 27.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is at 151 3rd Street. For information, 415-357-4000 or www.sfmoma.org .