Our Country's Good

Framing Americans: Juxtaposing Photographic Histories

If Robert Frank could respond to Kerouac’s introductory claim “You [Robert] got eyes,” his retort may consist of something along the lines of “No, I got heart.” As Sarah Greenough articulates in “Resisting Intelligence,” Frank found poetic lyricism in his departure from the European formalism that characterized his structured Swiss upbringing. Unlike the carefully composed frames of Cartier-Bresson, Frank sought liberation in the act of taking the photograph, the intuition that occurred in the moment, and the valuing of one’s heart as a conduit of personal expression as opposed to one’s eyes or brain as sources of culturally imposed values. The Americans, in subject matter and in form, was a testament to this freedom of method and composition. The search for a pictorial national identity of a nation founded on liberty licensed Frank to adopt a more liberal approach to depicting his reality on film. In many ways, the book became Frank’s navigation of his own identity in the borderlands between inclusion and exclusion as his own national identity was constantly in flux.

Robert Frank matured in a country that was, and always has been, in between. Switzerland epitomized the borderlands: between three politically active countries, as a neutral nation between opponents in war, and between languages. Like Switzerland, America is defined by a search for national unity in the face of explicit diversity. This search for commonality across seemingly disparate entities, whether they be geographies or races of people, is a quality Frank aimed for. Consequently, the emphasis on the importance of empathy is visible in his photographs.

Other artists have historically taken American identity to be the source of inspiration for their photographic journey through the country, most notably Frank’s mentor Walker Evans, and his contemporary Richard Avedon. However, the photographs from American Photographs and In the American West, both establish a distance between the spectator and the subject of the photographs. For example, Evans’ photographs as commissioned by the Farm Security Administration as a byproduct of Roosevelt’s Dust Bowl, exotifies the working poor and the signage that is indicative of their environment. There is an inherent voyeurism that exists in a photograph like “Sharecropper’s Family” as the viewer of the photograph is posited at the place of the photographer who has clearly composed this family portrait for the sake of the photograph. At the other extreme, Avedon’s portraits of Americans he encountered aims to destabilize the romanticized notion of manifest destiny. By suspending the unreality of the representation and forcing the viewer to call into question the idea of the prosperous West, Avedon makes a political statement about America’s ignorance of its poor underclass. The glamour shots of the working American succeeds in defamiliarizing the spectator from this notion of the average American. While Evans’ photographs reestablished the difference between subject and spectator, the portrayal of Avedon’s figures on a flat picture plane collapses the space between the spectator and the viewer in so far as the subject of the photograph is brought into direct conversation with the spectator. Nevertheless, the spectator maintains a position of power despite the returned gaze of the subject (as in Sandra Bennett) as Avedon’s figures are portrayed as if specimens on a microscopic slide removed from any contextualizing environmental cues.

On the other hand, Robert Frank situates the subjects of his photographs in the borderlands between these two extremes. The viewer, in Frank’s photographs, neither gaze voyeuristically from afar, nor engage in direct conversation, but rather she is in the shoes of the subject. The framing of the photograph is such that the picture is rarely taken straight on, but rather, from a diagonal that creates a sense of dynamism in the skewed linear perspective. This sense of depth allows the viewer to empathize with the subjects on a personal and emotional level rather than on the level of visual scrutiny as is the case with both Evans’ and Avedon’s photographs. In conjunction with the cropped “over the shoulder” perspective, Frank immerses the viewer in the midst of his subjects. This participatory approach to photography narrates Frank’s own journey through a country of which he was both a member and a stranger.

though my body has been canvased

by other men since you've gone

your traces still linger in the folds

and quiet spaces

where only souls venture in the silent

dawn of a sunday morning

meticulously erased

like rauschenberg to a dekooning

you've been framed and labeled

placed on a pedestal;

you no longer dilate seamlessly into the horizon.

stained in memory and in sheets

with marksman acuity

you linger in the passings

of every other old spiced man

and then of course

there was that night that i unwittingly

clung to his brazen chest

only to draw the surrogate aroma

deep into my diaphragm,

eyelids like lead of Serra,

respiring recycled reminiscence

on a curfew

hoping construct would give way to calling

but the body cannot lie like lips

spread like lies

nor quip like minds

werk.

to the subtle realization at the

first sign of light breaking through the blinds

that there is worthwhile work to be done.

to the impetus signified by the sighing of birds

that time awaits,

to the peace found in the rounds of feet

shuffling through subway stalls

and the canon of tracks on rails

as the LEDs inform the next manhattan bound L train

in 8, 6, 4, 2, minutes, has arrived.

to the 9 to 12

and 1-3

and 6-8

and 5, 6, 7, 8!

rather than the nine to five

to choosing to bring work home with you

out of dedication rather than obligation

to the work that supports the work

to making it to work

to making it work

to making others laugh, cry, think,

but most of all

to inspiring others to act

to being instead of doing

to doing instead of watching

to watching instead of nothing

to persisting through the perspiration

the letting of blood

the harvesting of tears

the renaissance of souls

to belief, and faith,

and knowing that you are making your parents proud

even though there's no stethoscope around your neck

no programmer's hunch in your shoulders

no hearing for you to attend to in the morning.

to knowing that there's just nothing else like it

so that when the final blackout falls

and the stage is lit only by ghost light

and shadows

you will have committed a part of your life

to the art of living

to breathing in the moment

to being present.

patron to the patriot

I never loved my country

as much as I loved you

Never propelled Freedom

from the lips that kissed you

and cradled yours back to sleep.

my body never trembled

in the wake of a shrapnel covered night

the way it did under the weight of your hips

sanding themselves off the edges of mine.

The children you dreamt of

are those lost to remnants

of mines

rather than ours, and

the union you fought for

was one of nations under peace

rather than the

you and the "s" we no longer discuss.

there is something poetically macabre

about

the one organ you can't donate

the one that ages in the sun

that conceals internal injury

that keeps it all together.

beat.

In German and Latin, the name “beat” derived from “Beatus” means “happy.”

In Swiss, the name means “blessed”.

Lisa Phillips, in her article, Beat Culture: America Revisioned, alludes to the contested nature of the meaning of “beat”, derived from the name that the Beat Generation eventually donned. She reveals that Herbert Huncke was the first to use the term in conversation, while John Clellon Holmes was the one who deemed the three iconic Beat poets—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs—as members of the Beat Generation in a New York Times article published in 1952.

Common readings of the term “beat” refer to the notion of being “beaten down”: a reference to those who are downtrodden but still alive and kicking. The term also provokes a notion of unbridled vengeance as the repressed fight back after a history of being mistreated. However, Phillips fails to mention that art from this period hardly gave witness to this notion of being burnt out or overrun. Rather, the work strove for an aesthetic defined by a distinct sense of vivacity—albeit sometimes nihilistic—that portrayed the immediacy and immanence of the fast and furious lives of the Beats. This sense of gestural drive is particularly apparent in the work of Franz Kline. It was in the search for the transcendental that the Beats were able to portray the street reality of their lives.

Alternately, the movement could be understood through the auditory lens of beats in music, particularly jazz improvisation. Not only are beats the seminal element and driving force of music, but contemporary musicians with whom the Beats were in cahoots with, redefined the ways in which beats were previously used in musical scores. Suddenly, the emphasis was on the downbeat, or the upbeat, or neither. The use of repetition with slight variations, as is apparent in the work of Wallace Berman, was certainly audible in Jazz. The immediacy of improvisation, mirrored in the gestures of the Abstract Expressionists, particularly Jackson Pollock, spoke to the urgency of time as the Beats sought the most heightened experiences in the present rather than re-presentations of those experiences.

The sociopolitical climate of the era lent itself to this frame of thinking and producing art. A meaning of the term “beat” that Phillips omits is that commonly used in theatrical texts where the word is used to signify a rest, a moment of silence, or a changed intention of the actor. This reading of “beat” can be ascribed to the liminal space between what the Beats considered to be the reality and the promise of American life (Phillips, 26). The Beats existed in the betweenness of wars. As the generation that came of age in the shadow of a World War, who also saw the potential for nuclear annihilation on the horizon, the Beats existed in a beat of relative rest. Consequently, the Beats turned to any visionary experience that would allow them to temporarily escape the reality of their corporeal existence. They sought transcendence whether through religion or drugs in order to find that beat, that moment of silence between the world’s destructive episodes. This moment of silence, of course then reproduced in poetry readings, would become the defining characteristic of the Beats in the media. Kerouac, at the Brandeis Forum in 1958, later reasserted his initial interpretation of “beat” to its spiritual connotation in reference to things that were “beatific.” This reading is congruent with Phillips’ mention that the Beats were interested in a renaissance of spirituality to avoid the coercion of culture enforced by the increasingly mediatized culture of the time.

The most ironic component of the Beats’ lifestyle was the sense of community created in their Bohemian adoption of anti-conformist beliefs; which by establishment, rendered them a collective of counterrevolutionaries rather than individuals. It was the Beats’ attempt to escape the beaten track that rendered them susceptible to cooption by the mainstream. Moreover, while Phillips’ article includes a picture of an African American man drinking from a water fountain with the sign “Colored” in the background, and she writes of the Beats’ interest in the “undiscovered man,” there is a distinct omission of the notion that the Beats were not nearly as obscured from society as some of its other constituents. Thus, while the Beats have been enshrined in pop culture as emblems of rebellious counterrevolutionaries, there was an entire race of people who would soon redefine the notion of a history of being “beat” who would reclaim the forefront of social consciousness in the coming years.

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Re: ply

Re: petition

Re: collection

Re: invent

Re: naissance

Re: present

Re: appearance

Re: new

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In performance, and in life, it is the disappearance of a body that makes the existence of the body in its absence ever more present.