Robert Frank's work is the best visual expression of the cultural movement known as the beat generation. He's beat generation's natural eye.
He moved from Zurich to USA in a florid moment for a persona like him. His pure spirit found the right place in the subculture of the time in America, and he embraced this visual, helped from his lack of education: an unfiltered view – you got eyes Kerouac said to him -
The climax of his work is The Americans, a book that I suggest everyone to look at. It's more than just a book of photos, it's a book of a country, of a time, it's a book that really picks the zeitgeist of the real America up; not the glossy one, not the always happy one, not the dream one: the Life. The Americans is the elegy of the post-war American's life in its essence, its purity, its harshness.
Frank's photography is spontaneous, it is vitalism and gloom.
Even if Kerouac wrote the introduction of the Americans, I think Frank's fellow spirit actually is Ginsberg. Energy, frankness and gloom are their sign.
Frank is all the larger that life Kerouac's vitalism, he's all Ginsberg's melancholy, he's all Ray Charles's energy; he's the voice of a generation sick and tired of fake smiles and lies, a generation hungry of truth, a romantic and auto-destructive society.
Look at his work listening to some blues and reading to some Ginsberg's poetry, that's the way to do it!
Hit the road Frank.
Reading:
Robert Frank (1959). The Americans. New York: grove Press
http://www.wussu.com/poems/agh.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Jack-Kerouac/dp/0140042598
