Not since Socialist/Heroic Realism in the 1930's has a mode of art been so rigidly constrained to a political orthodoxy, as photography has been for the last 40 years.

"The popular impression of the 1950's...is of a safe, dull period, kept quiet by either repression or contentment.  The photography of the postwar era, however, acts a corrective to this cliché.  [Regarding Robert Frank's The Americans]: published reviews claimed that his work was marred by spite, bitterness, and narrow prejudice...a sad poem for sick people'...surely the reaction owed part of its particular force to the fact that the images were nearly all of that nameless thing in the weeds behind the billboard of American life."

"In his travels across the States Frank finds little, if anything, to celebrate.  The dominant mood of these images is one of a bleak and gloomy sadness...."

 "Frank's work expresses cynical despair."

"The little vitality he recorded came from America's sub-cultures and counter-cultures ...editors felt his images were scratchy, grainy, sometimes out-of-focus and depressive; his bleak collections of slices of small-town America caught with its racist, homophobic pants down...

"Garry Winogrand's.... portraits of the shell-shocked and anomic society, wandering through public structures with no clear destination.

"Lee Friedlander's oddly silent urban landscapes seemed like pictures of an abandoned country.

"[Diane Arbus's people] were the final, conclusive products of the twentieth century, inheritors of progress, war, commerce, mass culture, and all the rest of it.

"If there was anything at all outside this purview, it was to be found in the rapidly shrinking wilderness."

"...an almost iconic statement on the nature of suburban America.  Spatially, for example, the geometry of the image is crucial.  The lawn takes up two-thirds of the photographic space and indicates precisely the sense of emptiness, sterility, and dislocation that pervades the image.  Equally, the trees at the back have a looming presence that suggests a haunting otherness. Even at this level the atmosphere seems gloomy, empty, and depressing.  A literal, physical configuration has given way to the beginnings of a compelling connotative register suggestive of a psychological and emotional inner space...An image of family relaxation seems to have been inverted and emerges as a psychological study of estrangement and loneliness which, in its compulsive effect, speaks about a whole culture's condition."

Here's another interesting photograph, by Helen Stitzer:

"[Stitzer's] work is distinguished by a unique vision that, in contradistinction to much of the ‘anonymous' street photography of Friedlander and Winogrand, is marked by a deliberate exploration of the syndactylism between photographer and subject.  In this example the new father, at a seminal moment of his life, is looking away from his newborn baby and instead is rather posing for the camera.  The eye focuses first on the father, then on the baby, whilst the woman who just delivered is carefully excluded from the frame.  The bland background is on closer examination a door, the doorknob above the man's shoulder a perfect example of Barthes' punctum .... The slightly goofy smile of the new father that is mirrored by the expression of his child is an example of Stitzer's subtle humor."

"For a number of years...I have suggested the need for an evaluation of what might be considered authentic photographic forms. One which I have paid particular attention to, and which has undergone extensive research, has been the question of the ‘snapshot'.... interestingly enough the snapshot's significance in modifying our attitude toward picture content has been quite remarkable...[and] has contributed greatly to the visual vocabulary of all graphic media since before the turn of the century."

‘The only real idea that I have about [my photographs] is that they are essentially snapshots.  For snapshots, I feel, often have an inherent simplicity and directness that I find beautiful.'

"...whom Szarkowski, famously, called ‘the central photographer of his generation' .... Here was a photographer who by the end of his career had barely mastered rudimentary technique, whose idea of a good place to go shoot was the airport, who got emotion into his pictures by recording the anger of the strangers he intruded upon, whose way of introducing graphic dynamism into his pictures in his later years was to always hold the camera at a tilt, and whose notion of a revealing human gesture was a hand feeding peanuts to an elephant trunk..... The single most remarkable thing about his career, in fact-aside from its eventual slouching ruin-is probably the credit and attention Szarkowski extended to him."

Frank's camera was a weapon against cultural and political conservatives and he saw it serve as an important avenue for expressing himself politically... and no doubt he was on a mission to persuade and possibly change what he felt were the narrow alternatives offered by the establishment's culture...It was at the height of the cold war -- the conviction of Alger Hiss in 1948, the 1950-54 rise and fall of Senator Joe McCarthy, and the June '54 executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg -- fueling paranoia and naïve racism and broadening the gap between rich and poor, blacks and whites, and leaders and followers ...Frank invited Kerouac to write the introduction to his book.  Both men shared the belief that U.S. power had an often corrupting influence; the most important political aim of the ‘Beat' movement was to change the country spiritually and culturally. Kerouac's "true-story novels" and Frank's photographs which were ‘...giddy with images of patriotism and militarism...' helped to name that discontent... 

"Incidentally, while I was researching the conditions surrounding the origins and politics behind "the Beats", the early and mid-50s was starting to look a lot like what's going on today.  America's renewed emphasis on patriotism and increased vigilance since 9/11 with the "spreading of Democracy" and the frequent mentioning of the U.S. "Imperialist stance" is eerily resonant.  Could this have something to do with the increase in prices of Frank's very politically edgy take on America as we approach the 50th anniversary of its execution?"