The Americans (photography)

The Americans (1958), by Robert Frank, was a highly influential book in post-war American photography. Frank selected 83 images from many taken during a two-year crosscountry journey, while under a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. The photographs were notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society. The book as a whole created a complicated portrait of the period that was viewed as skeptical of contemporary values and evocative of ubiquitous loneliness.

Beat author Jack Kerouac contributed the introduction to The Americans.