In an earlier posting I used The Americans as an example of how to render and structure content. In this post, I will look again to Frank, but this time for a sample process. Greenough offers clues to the steps Frank took in preparing for and subsequently creating the book. I have consolidated, organized and summarized the points below:
Pre-work / background:
- Had symbols in mind (pre-established)
- Had experience in book making
- Had an artistic (painting) background
- Knew the type of work he wanted to create: “dense, layered, and opinionated, yet multivalent.”
- He had a topic: a foreigner’s view of America
- Developed method for organizing his negatives
Execution:
- He grouped the images by theme: cars, race, religion, politics, the media. Then by: the way Americans live, work, eat, play; and minor subjects that caught his attention: cemeteries; jukeboxes; lunch counters
- On arrival in a town Frank had a set pattern of places to visit
- His views changed during the process based on what he saw and experienced
Practice:
- Photographic approach: he responded more immediately and intuitively. He took one, two, or three exposures, swiftly, surely, and decisively, and then moved on; style became looser, more casual, and even gestural, and all about movement.
- Anti-aesthetic style: blurred, out of focus … [but not always]
- Treatment of photograph (development / composition / physical nature): used to convey feelings of harshness; scuzzy; bleakness; monotony; dullness
- Subjects: His photographs depicted those who observe and those who are observed, those who see but do not or cannot act and those who act but do not see.
Selection & Editing:
- His process evolved: [over time] his objectives became increasingly layered and nuanced, he rejected these easier, more obvious solutions as “to clear” and “banal.”
- Summer to Fall 1956: developed film; reviewed contact sheets; identified those of interest
- Editing process (3-4 months)
- He grouped the images by theme: cars, race, religion, politics, the media. Then by: the way American live, work, eat, play; and minor subjects that caught his attention: cemeteries; jukeboxes; lunch counters
- Identified the strongest pictures; marked cropping; Shuffled pictures between groups; removed pictures he thought were banal, weak, too obvious, too harsh. Some subjects were completely removed (urban landscape; people trapped by detritus of consumer culture; immigration experience
- Spring 1957: down to 100 prints, he sequenced the book
- During this process he did return to the field (twice) to take some additional shots, presumably to fill in the gaps.
Structuring
- He wanted to engage the reader
- Forward hints at one of the larger themes in the book–the contrast between those who are powerless and those who are powerful.
- He wanted to create some kind of rhythm
- the first pictures in a series where the ones that didn’t move and then more movement in the pictures later on;
- the presence of absence of people; the act of looking; movement/stillness;
- dialectical pairing of opposites, as one of his organizational methods.
- began each of the four sections with a picture of the flag, he explained: “I had a definite idea of how I wanted to start and I shifted the pictures around.”
- people looking — spectators. And then you see what they’re looking at.”
- tried to not just have one picture throwing in alone, isolated as a picture.
- No preconceived ideas about what each section of the book should address and instead let their focus grow out of the active linking the photographs together; process of discovery.
- Used titles to highlight differences
- Placed contrasting pictures on successive pages to engender a more subtle approach; he went beyond a one-to-one comparison
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