In 1955, a young photographer set off across the United States with a mission that seemed almost comically ambitious. Armed with a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, Robert Frank was going to capture the true America, with all of its ambiguities and contradictions. He’d go to society balls, assembly lines, diners, and movie premieres. He’d portray the country’s gaudy splendor and find out its dirty secrets.
     Two years, forty-eight states, and 28,000 exposures later, Frank whittled his thesis on contemporary America down to eighty-three frames. They showed a country full of loneliness and unease, gilded over by a surface veneer of shiny cars and jukeboxes, American flags and neon signs. Cowboys, lunch-counter waitresses, factory workers, and bureaucrats gazed blankly or uttered private sighs as Frank caught them unaware, snapping away with his unobtrusive Leica.
     The Americans was first published in Paris in 1958. It had been rejected by American publishers, who felt that the subject matter was too bleak, the vision too intense. Initially these publishers saw no value in Frank’s oblique angles and tilted frames. When the French and Italian editions of Frank’s book were hugely successful, though, American publishers changed their tune, and the book was published in 1959. An introduction penned by Jack Kerouac praised the way Frank had “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.”
     This year, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of The Americans, Steidl has published a new edition of the work. Still feisty at 84, Frank was heavily involved in the 2008 edition: he revised the cropping of many frames and replaced two images with new versions of the same subject. Photographer Joel Sternfeld, who accompanied Frank to the Steidl press in Germany, writes that the new book is “as close a match as possible to the Delpire edition that had set photography on its fat ear when it first came out in 1958.”
     Over the next decade, Steidl will republish Frank’s entire life’s work, including a DVD set of the provocative short films that he started making in 1959. A major exhibition called Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans will tour Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and New York in 2009.
     The Americans reflects the mood of a turbulent decade, when postwar euphoria was giving way to racial tension and anti-Communist paranoia. But it’s not just remarkable for its subject matter. The book offered a new visual language for photography: an intimate, off-kilter aesthetic that’s been imitated so many times that it now seems obvious. In 1958, an era of Tupperware and Hula-Hoops, it was far from obvious. Like its contemporary Beat-era poetry and novels, The Americans was a blast of authenticity, a potent artistic statement, a revelation.