Robert Frank’s The Americans, from the Addison Gallery of American Art, comes a rare look at one of the most influential series of photograph in the postwar era. Curated by Jock Reynolds, the exhibition includes original editions of the book (first published in France in 1958 as Les Américains), as well as ephemera documenting the history and impact of the work from its creation in the mid-’50s to the present.

This body of work presents a powerful poetic vision that, like the work of the Beat poets and novelists whose social criticism presage the unrest of the 1960s, must be taken into account in our idea of American life in the 1950s. The pervasive sense of alienation, the shadowy sadness in Frank’s photograph of rural and urban America ran against the rhetoric of prosperity, and his evocation often desolate emotional space, echoing out of the seemingly endless physical space of the American landscape rankled the sense of order that become the dominant cliché of American culture of that decade.

WORKS
84

DIMENSIONS

20 x 24 (inches)
50.8 x 60.9 (cm)

SPACE REQUIREMENTS

280 linear feet (85.34 linear meters)

INQUIRIES

exhibitions@curatorial.org
626.577.0044

CURATOR BIOGRAPHY

Jock Reynolds is an American museum director, visual artist, and curator. He served as the director of the Yale University Art Gallery from 1998 until 2018. His artwork is interdisciplinary and he often works in sculpture, photography, conceptual art, performance art, and installation art.