Birmingham, Alabama

When the Birmingham News brought Robert Frank to town to document their city in 1987, they should have known what to expect: the Swiss-born photographer was by then famous for his disenchantment with America, having scrutinized his adopted country in the acclaimed photobook The Americans and many projects thereafter. Frank’s views of Birmingham, commissioned by the city newspaper to celebrate its centennial, are predictably grim; over a few days before Christmas, the photographer shuffled between bus stations, roadsides, and seedy motels. If these subjects—the neglected waystations of modern life—were familiar territory for Frank, the format with which he realized his vision was startlingly new.


Here, Frank’s composite presentation of prints nods teasingly toward travelogue, but frustrates sequential reading. He seems to guide us around a motel room, from the harshly lit bathroom to the doorway, the bed with its mottled duvet, and finally to his companions: a hired escort and a rented television. Yet, from Frank’s travel notes, we learn that he stayed in three different motels during his five-day trip, and only on the last night, at the University Inn, did he capture the "photo with TV & shadow" at bottom left. He could have made the other pictures that same evening, but maybe not—might some show the Granada Hotel, with its cold room and its lobby a "silent Pinter play"? And what about the Ranch Motel, where he first called an escort service but found the "# discontinued"? The four-part collage constructs order from a chaotic week, storyboarding something more straightforward. Around the time he made it, Frank was wrapping up a decades-long career in experimental film. Here, we find him searching for a new format, and investing his still photographs with narrative possibility.


In the centennial publication where this work first appeared, Birmingham museum director Douglas K. S. Hyland noted the cinematic logic of these images, but proposed another reading. For him the closest analogue to Frank’s work was not film but painting—particularly the Thomas Hart Benton mural America Today, also in The Met’s collection. As Hyland saw it, for these artists working fifty years apart, only "a panorama of images" could aptly account for the immersive anxieties of contemporary life.