A man with an agenda – book review

When this book was originally published in France (shock news) in 1958 , it would more appropriately have been titled ‘The Ugly Americans’, for Frank never misses an opportunity to show the very worst of America, whether making statements about race (the white man having his shoes polished by the black in a men’s lavatory), toil (the workers slaving away in the mass production factory), crass commercialism (fully half of all the pictures here) or poverty (most of the rest). Nowehere is the nobility, generosity and selflessness of the great American spirit to be found.

So from that perspective, one might well regard The Americans as the ultimate hatchet job, where the victims praise the results which ridicule them.

Nonetheless, there is a lot to praise here. Yes, the photography is stark and the printing depressingly dark, at least in my paperback edition. However, Frank has an uncanny ability to spot the incongrous in daily life (who can forget his surreal picture of the boy with the Sousa horn?) and captures, again and again, that same Decisive Moment which so eluded Cartier-Bresson in his American pictures. And while it may be hard to set aside the prejudiced sociological criticism in this collection of pictures (the handful of images of affluent citizens clearly has an axe to grind), the result is a truly fine collection of what any picture book should be about. Great photographs.

Unsurprisingly, The Americans remains in print to this day. Every photographer’s library should have a copy. Just take the left wing focus with a pinch of salt.