Inside "The Americans"

Currently on exhibition through August 23rd at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is Looking In: Inside Robert Frank's The Americans, an in-depth look at Frank's seminal work from 1958 that changed modern American photography.

The 83 photos in this collection were selected from more than 25,000 pictures that Frank took in 1955 on a road trip across America. In the foreword to The Americans, Jack Kerouac wrote that Frank "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world." Frank was conscious of the metaphorical quality of his pictures. He famously said that "when people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice."

Sarah Greenough, senior curator of the National Gallery of Art, talks about the exhibition in the video below:

Hopperesque

Edith and the Kingpin, Oakland, July 2007.

The influence of Edward Hopper on how we see things is so profound that his name has become an adjective: "Hopper," according to English writer Geoff Dyer, "has come to evoke a real place that looks like a Hopper as often as it refers to an actual painting."

The "Hopper look," represented famously in Nighthawks, has been quoted time and again in movies to telegraph loneliness, shadowy isolation or the seemingly interminable passing of time, perhaps most memorably in film noir and the films of Wim Wenders: Million Dollar Hotel, The End of Violence, and Don't Come Knocking, which Wenders called "a tribute to my favorite painter."

Hopper's influence on photography is equally vast. Edward Hopper & Company, edited by Jeffrey Fraenkel, is the catalog of a recent San Francisco exhibition that demonstrates the spirit of Hopper in the works of eight masters of photography: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Stephen Shore.

The photographs below are from the exhibition; the paintings are not (the gallery used other paintings and drawings from its collection). Fraenkel pointedly states in his preface that none of these photographers sought to imitate Hopper in any way; these pictures are not pastiche. Some of them, he said, would actually be surprised to find themselves included in the exhibition.

Perhaps no one more so than Walker Evans. Evans' early works from the 1930s have been compared to Hopper's architectural landscapes for having the same "airless nostalgia for the past." Evans has denied the influence, and claims that he was not aware of Hopper or his work at the time. But Dyer is skeptical. "There is no getting away from or avoiding [Hopper]," he said. "To see his pictures is to begin to inhabit them. You see them everywhere even when you are not looking at them." And that pretty much sums up Hopper's invisible but lingering legacy for all photographers.

Walker Evans, Main Street Block, Selma, Alabama, 1936.

Lee Friedlander, Las Vegas, 1970.

Stephen Shore, JJ Summer's Agency, Duluth, MN, 1973.

Robert Frank, Santa Fe, Mexico, 1955.

Diane Arbus, Lady in a rooming house parlor, NY, 1963.

Robert Adams, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968.


Wim Wenders and Donata Wenders, From "The Heart is a Sleeping Beauty"
Donata Wenders, Still shot from "Don't Come Knocking"

THE PAINTINGS:
Nighthawks, 1942. Early Sunday Morning, 1930. A Woman in the Sun, 1961. Drugstore, 1927. Gas, 1940. Hotel by a Railroad, 1952. Night Windows, 1928.

After you, sir

After Meyerowitz, Berkeley, March 2007.

A kind-hearted person would call the picture above a hommage; someone less generous would call it a rip-off. The truth must lie somewhere between the two. Joel Meyerowitz took this b&w picture of the lady in the ticket booth in 1963, a year after he left his job as an ad agency art director to become a full-time street photographer. The grill floating on the woman's face reminded him of Magritte's paintings. So he fell in line and pretended to buy a ticket so he could snap his very own Le fils de l'homme. In the case of my lady in the ticket booth, it was the memory of Meyerowitz' iconic image itself that compelled me to push the shutter.

It's fascinating that the sight of the ticket lady instinctively reminded me of Meyerowitz even though I haven't looked at his pictures for many years. Perhaps he experienced the flashback with Magritte similarly. Consciously or not, memory of images begets other images. For the street photographer, there is a hundred years' worth of photographic tradition and iconography to inform and influence what one chooses to capture. A boy looking out a tram window is not just a boy anymore, but a Robert Frank tableau. Every man on a bike seen from a staircase is also seen from the prism of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Women gossiping on a bench conjure Garry Winogrand.

As for our ticket lady picture, there must be thousands of ladies behind ticket windows at any given time and place, each one waiting to be photographed. But it was Meyerowitz who captured the image first and tattooed it in our minds. So after you, sir.



René Magritte, Le fils de l'homme (The son of man), 1964.
Joel Meyerowitz, Untitled, New York, 1963.
Robert Frank, Trolley, New Orleans.
Garry Winogrand, World's Fair, New York City, 1964.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hyeres, 1932.