Robert Lowery

Photo by Robert Frank in Newsweek

I like to read books on photography, and not just those dealing with the mechanics of taking pictures but especially those focusing on the philosophy of photography. In the June 2, 2008 issue of Newsweek, an article by Malcolm Jones entitled "A Terrible Beauty" accompanied by a black and white photograph caught my attention. The piece introduced me to the work of a little-known Swiss emigrant named Robert Frank. His landmark photography book The Americans turns 50 this year.

Jones informs the reader that when the book of photographs was first published, it was overlooked, selling only 600 copies its first year. But time has proved its important contribution and influence. The book was released at the height of the cold war. Americans were worried about the bomb and juvenile delinquency. The civil rights movement was in its infancy. Prosperity abounded. Describing the work "like a slap in the face," Jones tells us that there are only a couple of smiling faces in the whole book. More often than not, people are distracted, suspicious, angry. The picture accompanying the article is of "a New Orleans streetcar, with white people up front and African-Americans in the back" and captured the nation’s racial divide. (As I looked at the picture, I pondered it in light of the coming election; the scene is still relevant.)

In one paragraph Jones tells the reader that Frank was not a documentary photographer because there is nothing objective about his pictures. Yet I believe there is really nothing objective about any picture taken, be the snapping down by a six year old child or veteran photographer. I plan on purchasing the book because I want to see the pictures of the America I grew up in during the 1950s. I am told that I will see pictures of flags, jukeboxes, cars and crosses. The faces of sullen teens and lonely crowds mingle with desolate townscapes. I did not know that his book of pictures influenced fashion ads, music videos, movies, and even album covers.

The final paragraph concludes: "When life is hard–and it always is in these pictures–then you have to look hard . . . and when you do, you see beauty in the oddest places."

The prophet, pastor, and poet John was also a photographer. Life for the Christian was hard in the final years of the first century, and it was only going to get harder. John does not document events in the first century (or in the twenty-first century, for that matter). John was not objective when he recorded the revelation given to him by God. There is nothing objective about John’s pictures of good and evil. As Robert Frank took more than 20,000 pictures revealing a shadowy world of high-contrast black and white, so John presents his pictures in terms of black and white. There are no shades of gray. We either stand with the good or with evil, with the Red-stained Lamb or with the Red-producing Dragon. When I see the pictures in Revelation, I see pictures of Beauty and the Beast.