haddonstuff  -  where underachievement is a badge of honour

Since I was a teenager, when first saw reprints of the photographs in The Sunday Times magazine, I've had a fascination with 'The Americans'. For the first time, I saw photography that achieved something deeper than merely documenting an image, portraiture that accompanied a story - these photos were the story.

Here was sheer dynamism; subjects seeking to burst or seep out of their cropped frame. Action and inaction caught and brought together.

It seemed that in every shot everything could and would happen, that the photo's moment of clarity was alive with the potential to develop in any which way it wanted to.

There's a real voyeuristic quality to this work. In portraiture, people often stop being themselves and become the person they think the camera wants to see - they become the person they want to see in a photograph.

Frank's photos were about capturing that moment, the shots being literally snatched, with fast film and rapid framing resulting in grainy spontaneity.

Frank saw the real nature of the project as "observation and record of what one naturalised American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilisation born here and spreading here." 

I see the collection as a rear-view mirror; America literally caught in reflection.