Okay, Rab, but I think it depends on your definition of words like “compassion,” and “humanity.”
What do you think about Frank’s book, The Americans? There was some really rough stuff in there. The book certainly showed humanity and compassion, though not in a soft, feely way. The reason it showed compassion and humanity is that up to that time, some of our favorite humanitarians, including Norman Rockwell and Alfred Eisenstadt had been showing America as all sweetness and light, and were ignoring the downsides of what really was going on around them. For a while in the mid-fifties, roughly the period when Frank was shooting for the book, I was at Air University in Montgomery, Alabama. Every night when I’d come out there’d be KKK literature under my windshield wipers. The local “separate but equal” schools taught black boys how to do field work, and taught black girls how to do housework. Frank’s book showed the truth about what was happening, and it was shocking, even to outfits like Popular Photography, which in those days was about photography rather than equipment, and which panned the book.
Now, one question that comes to mind when I think about The Americans and its period is this: was The Americans street photography or photojournalism? Well, really good photojournalism always contains an element of street photography, and the best street photography is a chunk of photojournalism turned into fine art. What confuses the question is that a lot of photography called street isn’t street at all. But in the end, what I conclude is this: Frank was shooting street. Every one of the pictures in The Americans can stand alone as street photography, but Frank put them together and made a strikingly powerful photojournalistic statement. I think that what he did was more loaded with compassion and humanity than anything I’ve ever seen by Gordon Parks or Ernst Haas, though I like the work of both.