Recently it has seemed as if the only tradition revered in the museum world is the critique of tradition, a cause for score-settling as well as the occasional revelation. An intriguing update to the genre concerns anno domini 1955, remembered in the art-historical calendar for Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, and as the year when a young Robert Frank took to the road in his Ford Business Coupe to snap the shots that would become The Americans. No one is coming for the crown of Steichen’s lightning-rod exhibition (yet). But not only was Frank not the only photographer journeying across the country in ’55, he wasn’t even the only one doing it on the Guggenheim Foundation’s dime, as revealed in Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955, a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and making its final stop at the Brandywine Museum of Art.
Webb, the lesser-known Guggenheim fellow, was, like Frank, motivated by a desire to uncover the deeper American truths that facile photo essays published in Life and Look magazines glossed over (even if Webb contracted with Life to sponsor his trip). Unlike Frank, who went in search of the fast-paced future, and who in later years copped to a certain predilection for disorder, the cross-continental project of Webb, nineteen years the senior of his spitfire Swiss colleague, called for an ambitious program of walking, biking, and boating along old pioneer routes from east to west, all the while on the lookout for, as he declared in his Guggenheim application, “vanishing Americana and what is taking its place.” Deliberateness is clearly marked in the images he produced. The middle-aged family man was careful to frame his subjects in good light, identified his sitters (when they arranged themselves for his camera) by name, or otherwise kept a respectful distance. Also unlike Frank, who was escorted out of Mississippi by state troopers (thanks to his foreign passport and accent), tooled around Detroit with a prostitute, and in general shoved his lens right in people’s faces, Webb, as he said himself, “avoided any kind of intrigue and never did look for trouble.”
Alas, he appears also to have avoided such obvious symbols of America’s involvement with its past as this magazine was interested in at the time—the Antiques Forum at Colonial Williamsburg, not yet ten years old; repairs being made to Paul Revere’s Old North Church; the festival in Newport celebrating the anniversary of the arrival of Rochambeau, for instance—and failed to find evidence of pride in American history and culture among the hoi polloi. “Cheap newness . . . that has no character” was the order of the day, he reported mournfully, and in New Mexico he gave up his original project, bought a scooter, and continued on to the coast, shooting grungy bars, uranium dealerships, and other incidents of the American scene in a darker, more Frankian mode.
Having consigned his archive to an unscrupulous dealer in the 1970s, Webb was out of sight during the years when the hierarchy of twentieth-century photography was being constructed. His 1955 negatives were only rediscovered in 2016, in a California basement, and, through the efforts of the Todd Webb Archive and the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, as well as Lisa Volpe, curator of photography at the MFAH, sixty-one prints have made their way into the light, where they enter into a long-delayed conversation with the work of Webb’s canonized colleague.
Anxiety of influence can be as trying for curators as it is for artists, and yet the curatorial argument for Webb’s significance, elaborated in the thick catalogue that accompanies Across America, 1955 stops mercifully short of declaring him the second coming. For while it is possible that Webb was ahead of his time—his landscapes especially, such as Bonneville Salt Flats, UT and Oregon City, OR, anticipate the detached style of the New Topographics photographers who would come to prominence some twenty years later—the present exhibition leaves the theory that 1955 was the Year of Frank without any serious holes in it. Rather, visitors to the Brandywine are provided with another opportunity to appreciate Frank’s undeniable talent, the way his images consistently grab you by the viscera, and to envy again the degree of access given to him by his subjects, who stare right into the lens, souls bared.
It is perhaps unsurprising that a photographer known for his wild, drive-by style was better equipped to capture the reckless energy of postwar America. But to identify Frank with messiness would be to undersell him. And here is the promised revelation, at least for this reviewer: in spite of his own words and reputation, Frank’s photographs are remarkable first of all for how much sense they make. How perfectly the photographer sums up the dreams and dreary reality of mining booms in View from Hotel Window, Butte, Montana, or paints a parable of modernity, class, and longing in one sideways exposure from half the country away (Elevator, Miami Beach). Frank—who shot twice as much film as Webb on his journey—carefully edited the messy American mid-century into coherence, a project to defeat lesser men. Could it be that other art-historical bugaboo, genius?
Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955 • Brandywine Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania • February 9 to May 11 • brandywine.org
