The power of a project
For other examples:
Richard Misrach p. 49
Muzi Quawson p. 95
Maciej Dakowicz p. 116
First published in 1958, Robert Frank’s The Americans is a photography book portraying America as a country of loneliness, insecurity and racial segregation. It takes you on a road trip right into the disconnected heart of 1950s America.
As an art student the photographs confused me. They all seemed a little rough around the edges. They didn’t conform to my idea of ‘good photography’.
It was two more years before I realized I’d been looking at the The Americans all wrong. I’d been seeing the book as individual pictures; analyzing each one separately, trying to fathom why this one or that one was so ‘great’.
But The Americans isn’t meant to be seen that way. It’s a photographic novel with a beginning, middle and end. As a series, the pictures suddenly made sense. Together, their style and subject matter carry a message that no single one alone could ever voice.
If you go about capturing individual, unrelated pictures, you’ll end up with a nice enough set of photos, but you won’t come close to exploring photography’s full potential.
By committing to a series – whether it’s about a place, a person or whatever interests you – you’re able to tell a very carefully constructed story: one where the specific style and order of photographs is essential to their meaning. A story that articulates what you really feel.
The Americans
Robert Frank
First published in 1958