The scenario is simple. Two different photographers. The same year: 1955. The same grant: a Guggenheim. The same idea: travel across the country taking photographs.If you know the name Robert Frank, you know already. It ends with a sequence of 83 photographs, published in a book called “
You start with a question — let’s say, about America or aesthetics . You conduct a little research and concoct a hypothesis, e.g., “America is sad” or “Photographs are documentary, not artistic.” For a good experiment, you need a control. So: Two photographers. One gets the drug, the other a placebo.
The two photographers had similar kinds of curiosity but very different ways of seeing. Both were more attracted to people than to landscapes or things. They photographed roads and roadside businesses, billboards and signs, bars, parades, rallies, and public transport. They were alive to big themes like class and race relations, but also to the accidental, strangely poetic shapes made by bodies lying on picnic rugs or getting off chairlifts.
In 1955, Webb was 49 years old. Like Frank, he had a natural sympathy for people who were marginalized, overlooked, factored out. His decision to avoid car travel was obviously consequential, but he didn’t want walking and cycling to become the point of the exercise. “The trip itself as it stretches out assumes the dimensions of a saga,” he wrote to his wife, Lucille. “There was one stretch between Lovelock and Fernley — 40 miles without a tree or blade of grass and an inferno of heat.