He allows us to see just a few things, and the narratives that we're able to build as a result is what really makes this work so important.
My name's Rashid Johnson and I'm an artist who works in several different mediums.
Robert Frank is an artist and photographer that I was introduced to at a very early stage. At that time I really didn't understand much about more candid photography. I remember looking at these photographs in particular and thinking about the narrative that they started to build for me. It's interesting, him being a German Jew, born in Switzerland, who is basically a nomad, and yet he still notices what's happening in this country in 1955 and uses it as a point of emphasis for his photography in a book that he calls The Americans, which is essentially an attempt to tell an American story.
This segregated trolley in New Orleans: you see it go from this white to this dark space. And rarely do you see a photograph with the ability to frame itself in and out so many times. The single photograph really, in a sense, becomes, you know, five or six photographs that takes a true vision to see in a strategic sense. If you're looking to the idea of the eye of the photographer being in any way substantial, a photograph like this begins to help tell that story very clearly.
He puts this focus on the flag—this object of national pride. That must have been strange, the way that that image functioned in people's everyday lives. In this photograph they're being kind of drowned by this flag. The American people are taking a backseat to the monolithic idea of America. We are all subject to this national identity.
There's an economy of moves where he allows us to see just a few things, and the narratives that we're able to build as a result is what really makes this work so important. And you think about the approach that we have in photography today; they're incredibly different. There's a rawness, you know, knowing that your only opportunity is in that 30th of a second. And that may be something that's in some ways missing today.
Images tell a certain truth and if we don't continue to make ourselves aware of the things that we've had to negotiate, we're bound to then repeat those things. And so bodies of work like this help us understand that time and the decisions that we make going forward.
