In a short prose poem, six pages at best, Jack Kerouac sets the stage for a much longer visual poem by the photographer Robert Frank:

“Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world. . . . And I say: ‘That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address?’”¹

For many years my Dad worked as a photographer, first for the commercial company Cooper-Trent in Washington, DC, and later for the federal government. He was the one who first taught me how to shoot and process film, although I struggled with this. Later in college, 1967 summer school in Norfolk, Connecticut, it was Walter Rosenblum and his assistant, Sedat Pakay, who took us under their wings. Two other personal influences also should be mentioned here: the sensitive portraits of one of my classmates at Norfolk, Carol Ginandes; and a second classmate in Baltimore, Dudley Gray, whose visions of New York City are continually inspiring. All of these examples are ways to help us to see and to work directly.

In writing, it is no surprise that many contemporary poets used the dictum: first thought, best thought. Not unlike the photographer who composes, shoots, and fills the full frame, instantaneously. By writing directly, it eliminated the process of editing and re-writing, which can often make a work stiff, too structured, and not as spontaneous. So it is no surprise that the photographer Robert Frank hooked up with the writer Jack Kerouac for the publication of his photographic series “The Americans.”

Kerouac’s lines resonate with the imagery in equally spontaneous ways.

“——-The gasoline monsters stand in the New Mexico flats under big sign says Save——-the sweet little white baby in the black nurse’s arms both of them bemused in heaven, a picture that should have been blown up and hung in the street of Little Rock showing love under the sky and in the womb of our universe. . . .”²

“THAT CRAZY FEELING IN AMERICA when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured. . . with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film. . . . After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin. That’s because he’s always taking pictures of jukeboxes and coffins. . . !”³

“What a poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some young new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every gray mysterious detail, the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind. Whether ’t is the milk of humankind-ness, of human-kindness, Shakespeare meant, makes no difference when you look at these pictures. Better than a Show.”⁴

And Kerouac’s last word to all of this:

“Anybody doesnt like these these pitchers dont like potry, see? Anybody dont like potry go home see Television shots of big hatted cowboys being tolerated by kind horses.”

“To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.”⁵

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1 Frank, Robert; The Americans; (With and Introduction by Jack Kerouac); An Aperture Book, Grossman Publishers; New York, New York; 1969; p. vi.

2 Frank, Robert; The Americans; (With and Introduction by Jack Kerouac); An Aperture Book, Grossman Publishers; New York, New York; 1969; p. vi.

3 Frank, Robert; The Americans; (With and Introduction by Jack Kerouac); An Aperture Book, Grossman Publishers; New York, New York; 1969; p. i.

4 Frank, Robert; The Americans; (With and Introduction by Jack Kerouac); An Aperture Book, Grossman Publishers; New York, New York; 1969; p. iii.

5 Frank, Robert; The Americans; (With and Introduction by Jack Kerouac); An Aperture Book, Grossman Publishers; New York, New York; 1969; p. vi.