Society, the direst study

This past Monday, the photographer
Robert Frank died at the age of 94.
Seeing as an untiring, and sometimes
unsparing examiner of America, he's
urgently to be remembered for an al-
most paradigm-shifting attitude and
style in his portrayals of this so-
ciety, published in 1955, under the
title, The Americans. Among other
things, this compilation made it
possible, and quite necessary, to
stop conceiving of the United States
as a nation, and to study it exactly
as it is, as a society. Not a figment
for anthems, an organism for defining.

This photograph of an urban trolley
could have been taken virtually any-
where in the United States in 1955.
It happens to come from New Orleans,
and because it does, it enables what
the late San Francisco columnist Herb
Caen used to call, elsewhereans, to
recall in smug horror, and everyone
today to consign to antiquity, for
its candidly visible moral turpitude. 

Everyone, but the Supreme Court of the 
current American government, composed
unscrupulously and dishonorably to re-
flect the ruling presumptions of this
society in 1955. Robert Frank's Amer-
ica is enshrined in the Court's latest
tribute to Donald Trump's racist core
of political support, in Barr v. East
Bay Sanctuary Covenant, a ruling re-
jecting a U.S. District Court injunc-
tion against the new American govern-
ment's wholesale reversal of asylum
law as it relates, exquisitely, only
to the Southern border.

I do not pretend to understand pho-
tography. I do not pretend to under-
stand the law. But Robert Frank made
no claim to understand them, either.
His study was society, and how it
lived with itself. He contributed
unforgettably to the protection of
that urgent distinction, lifting the
fog of nationhood to show how we act.

Robert Frank
Trolley
1955