Robert Frank's 'The Americans' by Day Jonathan;

Author:Day, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intellect Books
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

LOSING MY RELIGION: NEW ICONS FOR A NEW CIVILIZATION

‘Icons’ is a term originally applied to devotional images created and used by the Byzantine, Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches. Paintings of Christ, Mary, the Saints and other religious subjects were seen as objects of devotion and inspirations in worship. Icons were, above all else, religious works. Frank saw a religious aspect in many of the objects he photographed. He recorded jukeboxes, gas stations and a silk-covered car at the exact moment in which their function as religious objects was apparent. Frank observed that this containment and representation of the divine within the material interestingly approximates the role traditionally fulfilled by the images of religion. This is not surprising. Karl Marx wrote that

Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again…

It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality…

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. (Marx 1977: 127)

His argument is that religion is necessary and functional in any society or human condition that is uncertain, threatened or oppressed. America, for most of its inhabitants, was all of these things. For so many of the reasons explored already, the 50s in America was a time of deep and profound change. If Marx’s necessary conditions for religion still prevailed, while the nature and conditions of civilization were changing, it follows that the emerging society needed new symbols. Frank said that he was looking for things ‘in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere’ (Frank 1954, in Greenough 2009: 362).

A secular materialistic society needs secular material signs for the world beyond the visible, as the old signs will slowly be defiled and disfigured. Frank found this new faith in unlikely objects and places, as he identified the credo of the America he experienced.

Frank was also interested in recording the passing of the old. His images of older symbols of faith are sometimes ambivalent, often eviscerating and rarely entirely positive. Perhaps only the other-worldly, inscrutable black priest who Frank photographed beside the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge is imaged as worthy of his snow-white vestments and the cross he carries. St. Francis (who isn’t really St. Francis, as we will see later) on the following page preaches to an LA highway and parking lot, appearing as an anachronism, a cry from the past, remonstrating with an oblivious America. Chicago sees the cross and the Saviour reduced to the subject of bumper stickers.1 No mystery, no wild impassioned life-giving talk of eternity. Just pieces of tin, stuck on to an automobile.

Frank’s imaging of the old sigils of belief is most often ironic, or critical. Department store – Lincoln, Nebraska pictures rows of small white crosses for sale on a store table. The sale sign reads ‘Hested’s. Remember your loved ones. 69 c’. At such a bargain price, these must surely be plastic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.