One writer embarks on a 9,000-mile roadtrip across America in the footsteps of the photographer Robert Frank, who captured the iconic images in his photography book “The Americans” on a similar trip in 1955.
,” one of the twentieth century’s most significant works of photography. It is, the filmmaker Ken Burns said recently, “the great American road-trip book.” Frank had grown up in Switzerland, arriving by boat in New York in 1947. When he set out on his travels, he “had no idea,” he said later, where he would find what he was looking for.
Nearly seventy years later, I wanted to get closer to “The Americans.” If it really was an enduring masterpiece, perhaps through it I would achieve insight into this now cleaving country. So, this summer, I decided to drive across America myself. Before Frank’s death, in 2019, I asked him his advice for travelling cross-country, and he said, “Drive the southern road. More people are outside.
As we descended the Eastern Seaboard, complicating our course was Frank’s propensity for misidentifying his own photographs. It was difficult to find the courthouse square that he supposedly photographed in Elizabethville, North Carolina, because there is no such town. Frank had a sly sense of humor, and he would say things like “It’s the misinformation that’s important.” He also understood that his gift was for revealing emotional truths, not precise geography.
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