The Americans

The Americans is a photography book by Robert Frank, first published in France in 1958 as Les Américains and in the United States in 1959 with an introduction by Jack Kerouac, collecting photographs Frank took during road trips across the country in the mid-1950s funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Its raw, off-kilter, often unflattering images of everyday American life, diners, funerals, jukeboxes, segregated buses and roadside scenes, drew hostile reviews on first publication for what critics saw as a bleak and un-American vision. It is now widely regarded by photography historians as one of the most influential photobooks of the twentieth century, reshaping the course of documentary and street photography that followed it.