Mike Seeger

1955–1957

Across America on a Guggenheim Fellowship

Inspired by Jakob Tuggener’s Fabrik, Bill Brandt’s The English at Home and Walker Evans’s American Photographs, and on the recommendation of Evans, Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Liberman, Edward Steichen and Meyer Schapiro, he secures a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph all strata of its society, from Detroit and Dearborn to Savannah, Miami Beach and St. Petersburg, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles, Reno, Salt Lake City, Butte and Chicago. Over two years of road trips, part of them with his family, he takes 28,000 shots, of which he selects 83 for The Americans.

1955–1957

Jailed in Arkansas

In a small Arkansas town he is taken to the police station and put in jail: it comes out that he is Jewish because of a letter from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the sheriff says they will have to find somebody who speaks Yiddish. Frank later recalled that it was scary and nobody knew where he was; elsewhere in the South a sheriff told him he had “an hour to leave town”, and these incidents may have contributed to the dark view of America found in his work.

1957

Meets Jack Kerouac

Shortly after returning to New York he meets the Beat writer Jack Kerouac, by Frank’s account at a New York party where poets and Beatniks were, though by another account Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s lover at the time, introduced them, and shows him the photographs from his travels. Kerouac immediately says he can write something about these pictures and eventually contributes the introduction to the U.S. edition of The Americans; Frank also becomes a lifelong friend of Allen Ginsberg and one of the main visual artists to document the Beat subculture.

1958

“Les Américains” is published in Paris

Because his images depart from contemporary photographic standards, Frank has difficulty at first in securing an American publisher, and the book is first published in Paris by Robert Delpire in the Encyclopédie Essentielle series, with texts by Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck positioned opposite the photographs.

1959

“The Americans” in the U.S.: harsh criticism

The book is finally published in the United States by Grove Press, without the texts but with Kerouac’s introduction, and initially receives substantial criticism: Popular Photography derides the images as meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness. Sales are poor at first too, but the popular Kerouac’s introduction helps it reach a larger audience, and over time The Americans becomes a seminal work in American photography and art history, the work with which Frank is most clearly identified.

1961

First solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago

He receives his first individual show, Robert Frank: Photographer, at the Art Institute of Chicago.