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There are few single works of art that have changed the direction of their medium. In 1959, one book dramatically altered how photographers looked through their viewfinders and the way Americans saw themselves. The Americans was the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, and the National Gallery of Art is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the book's American debut with an exhibition. Curator Sarah Greenough says The Americans was actually reviled when it was first published in the United States. "Popular Photography asked a number of writers to critique the book and almost all of them were very negative," Greenough says. "It was described as a sad poem by a very sick person."

Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans - Expanded Edition by Sarah Greenough, Robert Frank Steidl First published in France in 1958, then in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank's The Americans< changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In eighty-three photographs, Frank looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians, and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just his subject matter - cars, jukeboxes, and even the road itself - that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally, and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative. More of an ode or a poem than a literal document, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was fifty years ago.