Robert Frank

With the publication of The Americans in 1958, Robert Frank changed the course of postwar photography. After leaving his native Switzerland in 1953, Frank applied his talent with a handheld camera to present a gritty picture of the United States that was provocatively out of sync with the nation’s optimistic sense of itself. In 1955, with a Guggenheim fellowship he received with the support of Walker Evans, Edward Steichen, and Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, Frank purchased a used Ford coupe and crisscrossed the country for nearly a year, taking photographs.

From over seven hundred rolls of film, Frank selected Indianapolis as the penultimate of the eighty-three images in The Americans. The picture encapsulates the photographer’s astute attention to racial and economic inequalities, budding subcultures, and the romanticism of the American road at midcentury. The photograph of a denim-clad African American couple on a motorcycle is at once provocative yet intentionally ambiguous. In the 1950s motorcycling represented a rebellion against middle-class society. In 1953 Marlon Brando played a bad-boy biker in The Wild One, a film based on the infamous Hollister riot of 1947. In 1956, the same year as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the beginnings of the civil rights movement, an image of black motorcyclists might have been discomfiting for many white Americans. In fact, The Americans was derided at first by many critics as “un-American” because Frank jettisoned any veils of propriety and captured the people he encountered with blunt candor and unflinching attention.