Back lot--Hollywood 39

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