America and Other Myths

Photographs by Robert Frank and Todd Webb, 1955

Lisa Volpe, Susan Straight

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Hardback

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English

Yale University Press
10 October 2023

Individual photographers

Robert Frank’s and Todd Webb’s parallel 1955 projects to photograph America are considered in the context of mid-twentieth-century American culture

In 1955 two photographers were awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation to embark on trips across the United States. Robert Frank (1924–2019) drove coast to coast, photographing the highways, bars, and people that formed the basis for his widely admired publication The Americans (1958). Todd Webb (1905–2000) walked across the country, searching for “vanishing Americana and what is taking its place.”

Unaware of each other’s work, the photographers produced strikingly similar images of the highway, parades, and dim, smoky barrooms. Yet while Frank’s grainy, off-kilter style revealed many inequities of American life, Webb’s carefully composed images embraced clear detail and celebrated the individual oddities of Americans and their locales.

This revelatory book is the first to publish Webb’s 1955 photographs and connects these parallel projects for the first time. More than one hundred images accompany text illuminating Frank’s and Webb’s different perspectives and approaches to similar subjects and places; the difference in reception of Frank’s iconic work and Webb’s relatively unknown series; and the place of the road trip in shaping American identity at midcentury.

Published in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Exhibition Schedule: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

(October 8, 2023–January 7, 2024)

By: Lisa Volpe
Afterword by: Susan Straight
Imprint: Yale University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 273mm, Width: 254mm,
ISBN: 9780300270891
ISBN 10: 0300270895
Pages: 184
Publication Date: 10 October 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Lisa Volpe is curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Susan Straight is a writer whose books include Highwire Moon (2001), a finalist for the National Book Award, and Mecca (2022).