No Country for Old Men: Photographing Melancholia in Robert Frank’s The Americans

Abstract

This paper explores Robert Frank’s photographs of southern California from his collection The Americans (1958). Using Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin’s historical-materialist approach, I show how Frank dismantles Hollywood’s dream factory as he travels through the heart of the culture industry. Frank’s photography stands at the crossroads of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s philosophical fragments on modernity’s ruins. Challenging any grand narrative about sociohistorical progress in his desultory arrangement of photographs, I argue that Frank’s methodology is wedded to how the two philosophers approach a philosophy of history. Whether he is shooting overgrown suburban yards, a solitary figure on Main Street, or the backside of the Hollywood sign, Frank shows how California’s imagined Arcadia comprises scenes of abandonment and melancholic loss. Like the philosophers from the Frankfurt school, Frank’s images suggest that the culture industry fabricates a false sense of community and fuels an atmosphere of isolation inhabited by reified commodities and the obsolescence of their consumers.