Fourth of July, Jay, New York

In 1955 the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank rented a secondhand car and, for the next two years, traveled with his 35mm Leica camera throughout the United States, capturing his impressions with the ironic distance of an outsider. Made possible by a Guggenheim Foundation grant (the first awarded to a foreigner), this photographic odyssey resulted in a landmark book, Les Américains, published in France in 1958. The brilliant technical “wrongness” of Frank’s gritty, rough, and graceless images represented a new and highly influential expressionistic approach to photographic observation. Meant to be viewed as a series, Frank’s photographs are filled with such Americana as luncheonettes and jukeboxes, tailfins and motels, and the American flag. Dominating this depiction of the nation’s annual birthday party, which Frank made before embarking on his trip around the United States, the star-spangled banner hardly waves bravely or freely. Instead it hangs down over a Fourth of July picnic, sheer and patched, like the bars of a prison. As the Beat writer Jack Kerouac noted in his introduction to the controversial 1959 American edition of Frank’s book: “With that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.” Frank subsequently turned to filmmaking and returned to still photography upon his move to Nova Scotia in 1969.