Tod Papageorge: Photography: The Missing Criticsm

April 7th, 2010

Photograph by Walker Evans. Truck and Sign. New York. 1930.

Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence

By Tod Papageorge

THE PURPOSE OF THIS MONOGRAPH IS TO
describe the influence of Walker Evans’
American Photographs (1938) on The Americans
(1959) of Robert Frank. To do this, the
photographs in the two books have been edited
and yoked together in a series of comparisons.
What follows, then, is an exercise in speculation,
one born of love and respect. It is offered as a
working idea rather than an assured truth, a
reasoned pretext for returning to the two great
books it examines.
Frank’s photographs are printed here
according to the way they were cropped in the
Grove Press edition (1959) of his book; my
discussion of The Americans will be based on
this version of it.1 A small black book beautifully
printed in gravure, this edition presented Frank’s
pictures as a sequence of charged, lyric poems.
In the later editions of The Americans (New
York, Aperture, 1969; 1978), this sense of
intimacy has been lost, both because the printing
of the book changed, and because many of the
photographs which had been precisely framed in
the Grove version have been shown by Frank in
these editions in uncropped variations or some
other form. This has had the affect of
compromising the impression of controlled
ferocity that marked the earlier book, where
every picture, regardless of the complexity of its
structure, was clear and realized. Since the Grove
book also describes Frank’s original response to
present purposes, the definitive edition.