I am unqualified to talk about race relations, in the United States or anywhere else. But race relations, particularly in the context of how the country I am a part of moves through its current moment in history, have been on my mind a lot recently.

This started with my reexamination of Robert Frank’s “The Americans.” Frank, a Jewish Swiss-Canadian photographer, received a pair of Guggenheim Grants to travel through the United States in 1955 and 1956 to document its people, life and culture. The resulting work, originally published in 1958, has become a pillar of modern documentary photography. That original publication was in France – it was not produced in the U.S. for another year. 

It is not flattering. 

Even though the 1950s is depicted as something of a “Golden Age” of American society – particularly by those of a certain political persuasion – “The Americans” depicts a country splintered along racial and socioeconomic divides. It dives into the parts of the American story that don’t show up in history textbooks very much because history so often focuses on events while photographers like Frank – especially Frank – focus on people. Their individual experiences are not remembered by history, but collecting them together creates a historical document that can’t be ignored. 

Indeed, it’s hard to ignore Frank’s view of America because it bears so many similarities to the present day. To me, the scene presented within the first five pages says so much. After a scene-setting first plate, “City Fathers – Hoboken, New Jersey” presents a ruling class on an elevated platform, clothed in opulence and looking out with a Buffett of expressions, none of them good. Then, “Political rally – Chicago” presents a bellicose man, clenched of fist and fiery of temperament, seeking to energize an unseen crowd, perhaps drawing your attention away from what the “City Fathers” are up to. 

The next two pages, “Funeral – St. Helena, South Carolina” and “Rodeo – Detroit” depict two groups who are utterly opposite – in color, appearance, location, and more. They’re even facing opposite directions, on opposite sides of the frame from one another. If you were to put prints of the images next to each other on a table, the subjects could be facing away from each other or looking toward one another across a chasm of negative space, but nothing else. Opposites divided, with wildly different outlooks – a story of two separate American experiences with no overlap.

The entirety of Frank’s collection tells a much richer, deeper story, but that these first four images are so evocative of a time 70 years after they were made is striking. 

How did we get here? I got an insight into that the next week, when work took me to Washington, the nation’s capital, to experience the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, while documenting the experience of those in my group – Jewish community members and parishioners from one of Portland’s preeminent historically Black churches. 

What struck me right away was an image at the Holocaust museum from the early days of Hitler’s dominance of Germany. It showed a German police officer on patrol with a uniformed member of the Sturmabteilung, the Nazis’ first political paramilitary. Our docent, a Holocaust survivor, explained that this image was telling of the integration of the machinery of the state with the Nazi party, but I was fixated on the dog between them.

Muzzled, straining and with a look in its eye that was genuinely terrifying, the dog in the image was immediately reminiscent of other dogs in other photographs of the power of the state used to suppress a group that didn’t accept the political order of the day. Indeed, just such an image was displayed in similarly large scale as part of a video in the section of the African American history museum’s covering the civil rights movement in the 1960s.  

We’re now at a point in our American history where racism, bigotry, antisemitism, and so many other manifestations of hate are taking center stage once again – backed by the power of the state. A short video at the beginning of the Holocaust museum’s main exhibit explained the political maneuvering and underlying societal conditions in the 1920s and 30s that brought Hitler to power and allowed him to consolidate it into a dictatorship. The similarities to modern events are beyond ominous. Remember that these events took place with the support of a broad cross-section of the German public. 

In addition to the official itinerary, I took the time to visit some of the memorials and monuments that dot the city. It was my fourth time in the District of Columbia, but my first looking at it with a photographer’s eye. As I examined the edifices built to figures of the past or the ideals they are claimed to have espoused, I couldn’t help but think of the characters depicted by Frank, not in monumental form but in gritty, grainy black-and-white reality, and how much this country’s history differs from how it’s remembered – particularly by those of that same political persuasion I mentioned earlier. 

Another photographer named Robert – Robert Adams, in this case – said in 2021: 

“There are at least two kinds of silence that define us. One is the eloquent silence of the world as we were given it — the silence of light and beauty, the silence that holds a promise…there is also sometimes a dark silence within us, one that results from willful blindness and deafness. We struggle against it. What will America be? Will it accord with the stillness of sunlight?”

“What will America be?” The answer lies in what America is made of. A country is not made of ideals and memories and gestures. Countries are made of people, so the answer to that question lies in another question:

Who are The Americans?

To ask the question honestly will take courage. We may not like the answer.