In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel includes a brief section on the birth of America, describing it as “The land of the future.”Footnote ¹ Because of its nascent state and spatial distance from Europe, Hegel deemed America outside the space where world spirit could reveal itself in history’s unfolding. For Hegel, the fulfillment of history – whereby spirit becomes conscious of itself in time, thus leading toward reason in history – was to take place in Europe, specifically in his homeland of the Prussian state. America signified for Hegel a geographic marker to denote a specific space on a map where history would eventually disclose itself in the future. Hegel argued that since America is positioned toward a future, it is thus outside the scope of historical analysis, which is oriented toward the past. By juxtaposing Europe to America – the “Old World” to the “land of the future,” the “land of desire,” the realm of dreams, and the sphere of potential action – Hegel depicts how America retains only an echo of the Old World. He also acknowledges the rudimentary idea behind the American Dream: America entails the work of the imagination that gestures toward some withheld idealized future.

Hegel continues by delineating the sheer magnitude of the country’s size, which expands from the Appalachian and Alleghany mountains to the Great Lakes and Mississippi river and the immense western horizon. When the “European independence of spirit” via the faculties of human cognition is applied to nature’s vast frontier, the seemingly infinite space, which confronts the land’s newest inhabitants’ imagination with wonder, opens up limitless possibilities of a boundless future. However, in Hegel’s reflections on the American landscape, California is not mentioned. The space that would eventually become intertwined with America’s reflections on itself and its future had yet to become a locus in the cultural imagination of the US, let alone for the preeminent Teutonic philosopher of history.

By the twentieth century, the US had become a place where German writers and artists could reflect on the modern American experience. California would eventually become the epicenter for their critical reflections on the country’s cultural-historical relevance. During the mass exodus in the 1930s of German intellectuals and artists from Hitler’s Third Reich, a new wave of émigrés reached America’s shores to escape the spread of fascism. Many of these exiles traveled westward to resettle in southern California. However, instead of symbolizing some utopic space, the areas around LA, specifically Hollywood, signified for them both “paradise and hell,” as Bertolt Brecht wrote. While the composer Eric Zeisl described California as a “sunny blue grave,” the German composer Hans Eisler said, “It is the ideal place to write elegies.” California, the place where ideas behind the American dream are manufactured, would come to embody the collapse of this land of the future for many German exiles and émigrés.Footnote ²

For Theodor Adorno, this setting of the flourishing palms and majestic Pacific was not one that suggested vitality for him; rather, he compared its health-conscious inhabitants to “prepared corpses.”Footnote ³ In opposition to Hegel, Adorno argued that America must become the point of reflection and be brought to consciousness for any contemporary reflection on history to unfold. Rejecting Hegel’s nineteenth-century position on America, Adorno wrote, “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that any contemporary consciousness that has not appropriated the American experience, even if in opposition, has something reactionary about it.”Footnote ⁴ For Adorno, the American experience consists of this precarious balance between the utopic imagination of what could be and a reflection on contemporary catastrophe. Contrary to Hegel’s land of the future, when Adorno arrives in Los Angeles he focusses instead on the illusions behind this synthetic world.

Similar to Adorno’s journey to America in 1940, the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank left Europe by ship from Rotterdam and arrived in New York City in 1947. In 1955, after being awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, Frank traversed the United States by automobile and eventually reached the shores of the Pacific, where he spent three months taking pictures around southern California for his groundbreaking collection of photographs The Americans (1959). Published during the Cold War, the book offered prescient photographic depictions of the rising anxieties surrounding politics, racial segregation, and the isolating effects of a burgeoning consumer culture. Frank counters the optimism depicted in mass media images, such as Life magazine, with scenes of desolation and ruin. My focus narrows in on the photographs Frank takes in southern California: the geographic endpoint of his journey across America. In his introduction to The Americans, Jack Kerouac describes California as “The lonely vision of the west … the orangebutted west lands of Arcadia.”Footnote ⁵ However, the “west lands” become more like a wasteland. Some of the most forlorn scenes Frank depicts in The Americans and on his contact sheets transpire in California. Whether he is shooting overgrown suburban yards, a solitary figure on Main Street, or the backside of the Hollywood sign, Frank shows how this imagined Arcadia comprises scenes of abandonment.

Like the many German exiles who travelled to Los Angeles during the war, Frank temporarily made LA his home from December 1955 to March 1956. His photographs during this period focus on the same images from Adorno’s self-reflections of his uprooted life in California in Minima Moralia (1951), including palm trees, empty pools, all-night diners, Hollywood studio backlots, and the intense sunlight reflecting off car windows. A visual concomitant to Adorno, Frank’s images suggest that the culture industry fabricates a false sense of community and fuels an atmosphere of isolation inhabited by reified commodities and their consumers. The objective of this study is to read Frank alongside the philosophy of history as constructed by the Frankfurt school. In addition to Adorno, I will show how Frank’s approach to America’s urban spaces is also aligned with another German exile who never arrived: Walter Benjamin, who had planned to emigrate to New York but killed himself before the Nazis could arrest him in 1940. Interrogating the American experience via photography, Frank takes up Benjamin’s project of cultural critique in relation to its landscape and people. He expresses through his photographs what Benjamin analyzes in his philosophical engagement with modern European history. Frank is urban photographer, flâneur, and ragpicker, who casually walks the streets collecting the material of cityscapes and small towns across America.

The themes that interest Benjamin are also part of Frank’s optic: flânerie, commodity culture, advertisements, and industrial commodities. Benjamin writes, “Poets find the refuse of society on their street and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse. This means that a common type is, as it were, superimposed upon their illustrious type … Ragpicker or poet – the refuse concerns both.”Footnote ⁶ Guiding us to the margins of Los Angeles to show us the outcasts of these spaces, Frank collects the detritus of the city’s landscape. Whether turning the topography of downtown LA or New York’s Bowery into a text, Frank approaches the city like Benjamin’s depiction of the ragpicker. He looks at the cultural refuse of mid-century America and puts these fragments alongside one another. The ragpicker “makes use” of this debris and reassembles the traces of the past alongside the present moment.Footnote ⁷ In turn, we are left with the task of uncovering the meaning emanating from this constellation of ruins. Despite the abundance of light and pastoral imagery, the idyllic space of the West is rendered into noir-like photography, dominated by gloomy grey images, oblique angles, and lonely figures swallowed up in the city’s environs.Footnote ⁸

It is not in the scope of this analysis to tie the disparate threads of Frank’s collection into some totalizing narrative. The more one tries to synthesize the eighty-three pictures in his collection – not to mention the thousands of outtakes – the more profoundly the epistemic abyss opens up. Instead, this study will follow one specific thread within The Americans: the photographs he took in and around Los Angeles.Footnote ⁹ Frank resided there for three months and travelled back to LA a second time in 1958. Despite having spent the most extended period of his journey in California, there is no sustained, critical reading of the photographs taken in southern California. Capturing a deep-seeded melancholia lurking in the back alleys and main streets of LA, Frank focusses on a specific historical moment in American culture: the era of postwar 1950s America, its optimistic tale of prosperity and the impact of the entertainment industry on contemporary society.

Through nonlinear sequencing, repeated motifs, and a subjective camera, Frank portrays the United States not as a series of distinct places but as a fragmented national consciousness: one marked by shared disillusionment, spectacle, and silent longing across space. And yet these regions are marked with thematic continuity. Despite Frank’s attempts to avoid geographical segmentation throughout the structure of The Americans, as he moves fluidly between distinct regions of the country, these separate areas – including the South, Detroit, the Northeast and southern California – still convey a uniqueness of specific themes. While Frank’s photographs of the South center on images of segregation, those taken in and around Detroit revolve around the automotive industry and American car culture, while the Northeast is permeated with scenes of urban alienation. Likewise, those taken around LA return to the ways in which the culture industry is enmeshed with the California Dream.Footnote ¹⁰

Why does southern California become such a key topos in the collection? In terms of what this place symbolizes in the country’s cultural imagination, David Ulin writes, “It reveals the limits of our history – demographic history, social history, history of technology, our sense of this place as final landscape, last territory on the continent, where we face ourselves because there is nowhere to turn.”Footnote ¹¹ It is central to the historical narrative of American progress and westward expansion, where Manifest Destiny links this trajectory to some divine agency. While California may capture the supposed zeitgeist of a specific arrival out west, Frank’s images strip off the layers of this fantasy. As Brecht wrote in his journals during his exile in Santa Monica in 1941, “Scratch the surface a little and the desert shows through.”Footnote ¹² Frank goes even deeper to unearth the reified bodies and objects lying beneath sunny California’s veneer. He takes various shots of the entertainment industry, including Hollywood premieres and starlets, studio audiences and acting classes, star maps and Grumman’s Theatre, studio backlots, and the yearly Valentino commemoration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. But there is nothing animated about these scenes. With its palms, sunlight, beaches, and glimmers of stardom, LA – the iconic place where images are manufactured and propagated around the world – serves as the apex of the American Dream in the cultural imagination. However, Frank’s photographs reveal a sense of dystopia and melancholia as he wanders through the city and along its perimeters.

Moreover, Los Angeles served as a point of transit where Frank’s project underwent significant changes. Sarah Greenough briefly discusses how Frank’s stay in LA impacted how he envisioned America and his artistic project. She describes how Frank’s objective transformed during his time in LA, where he began developing his photographs in a darkroom for the first time. The darkroom offered a space of insight for him. He wrote to his parents, “America is an interesting country, but there is a lot here that I do not like and would never accept. I am also trying to show this in my photos.”Footnote ¹³ While Greenough even describes his images as being “elegiac,” she does not delve deeper into this transformation. Frank wrote to Walker Evans, “To live for two months in LA is like being hospitalized in a Paris hospital. You will know all the horrors of Paris – and in LA you have the horrible America. If you have to stay longer one gets worse quickly.”Footnote ¹⁴ Finding his outlet through photography, Frank’s photographs in and around LA capture this necrosis at the heart of the culture industry.

Numerous scholars have compared The Americans to poetry, emphasizing how its lyrical and fragmentary qualities supplant a straightforward documentation. Kerouac was the earliest voice to describe The Americans as poetic. In his introduction to the 1959 Grove Press edition, Kerouac asserts that Frank “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.”Footnote ¹⁵ Critics such as Tod Papageorge and Sarah Greenough repeatedly discuss how Frank constructed visual poems in which his sequencing and perspective reflect a poetic tone more than a journalistic one. Frank abandoned conventional narrative in favor of a more poetic structure: one that values ambiguity and lyrical disjunction. Jno Cook describes how Frank “turned from the fact and fiction of the photo essay to poetry. It was poetry set in the vernacular of vision.”Footnote ¹⁶ Frank himself described how one needed to approach his photographs as if reading over a line of poetry. “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”Footnote ¹⁷

For instance, when I look at Frank’s photograph of “Backyard – Venice West” I discern a poetic echo with W. B. Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” In Yeats’s poem, the poet reflects on the contrast between the vigor of youth and the inevitable decline of age. The opening lines, “That is no country for old men,” suggest a world obsessed with sensual pleasures and physical vitality, one that marginalizes the old.Footnote ¹⁸ Representing an ideal realm of timeless art and spiritual transcendence, “Byzantium” signifies an escape from the ephemeral world. In this realm, art transcends the decay of the body and the impermanence of human life. The poet imagines himself transformed into a golden, eternal artifact, an “artifice of eternity,” as a way of escaping the limitations of the physical world.

In Frank’s photograph of the Venice backyard, the starkness of the objects – a seated, solitary man surrounded by trees, plants, scattered debris, a wrecked car, and a clapboard house – creates an atmosphere of abandonment where time has stalled. The man is juxtaposed with a rusted wrecked car that conveys a sense of immobility. Whether it is the detritus of consumer culture like a home, automobile, or the individuals who dwell within the city, something or someone undergoes a mortification. Surrounded by a hat, a broken chair, a shovel, glass jars, and a bamboo pole stuck in the ground before him, the bottom half of his body is concealed by plants and other material. A tangle of branches empty of leaves is on the left side of the photograph, while another tree has an abundance of foliage on the right. Like the wrecked car, the man too is entangled in vegetation. The empty chair positioned alongside him accentuates his loneliness as he reclines beneath a makeshift shelter resembling a flag, as if to shield himself from the sun. The backyard feels disordered, filled with remnants of former vitality, displaced by the melancholic paralysis.

Frank’s work parallels Yeats’s exploration of a world that struggles to find lasting meaning amidst superficiality, whereby photography elevates the quotidian into an enduring work of art. His unadorned depictions of California, whether of desolate streets, wrecked cars, or lonely men, highlight how art can distill moments of critical reflection from the transient and ordinary. But California is no Byzantium for Frank. He often challenges the glamorous ideal of California as a place of promise – the land of Hollywood, sunshine, and infinite possibilities – as his lens captures the abjection beneath the surface. Once configured as an image of Arcadia and Byzantium, a supposed space of art and transcendence, Frank’s California is no longer a place for old men. While Yeats’s old man imagines sailing to Byzantium, it is as if Frank’s lonely figure drove westward to find a home by the sea but reached a dead end. California, a place associated with sensual life and the dream factory, undergoes a transformation in this unkempt garden: the man is like a scarecrow, or, as Yeats writes, “a paltry thing / a tattered coat upon a stick.”

My critical methodology in analyzing The Americans draws on the works of Adorno and Benjamin. More specifically, The Americans resists the conventions of the “culture industry” and the ideological veneer of postwar prosperity. Throughout the 1950s, mainstream American photography, exemplified by Life magazine, offered polished, celebratory depictions of prosperity and national unity. Contrary to such images, Frank’s rough, off-kilter compositions highlight alienation, inequality, and social fragmentation. In Adorno’s terms, Frank refuses the standardized, commodified images that reinforce ideology, exposing instead the contradictions lurking beneath the “American Dream” and disrupting our passive consumption of the photographs. Frank’s photographs open up the possibility of recognizing reality from a new perspective, exposing viewers to the social tensions that mainstream imagery suppressed. Through the Frankfurt school’s methodology, then, The Americans can be read as a work of critical theory in visual form.

In fact, Adorno’s fragments from Minima Moralia could accompany Frank’s images of his journey across the country in 1955 and 1956. He photographs such forsaken sites in his investigation of American culture within late capitalist modernity and the era of supposed socioeconomic prosperity and optimism during the 1950s. Adorno sees America as hovering between utopia and catastrophe:

Adorno’s analysis of Kafka’s Oklahoma Theatre is tied to his critique of the culture industry and the illusory promises of modern capitalist society. With its utopian pledge of inclusion, the theatre masks a more sinister reality and mirrors how contemporary societies offer illusions of freedom. However, individuals are instead subjugated to a system that erases their autonomy and identity, reducing them to cogs in a vast, impersonal machine; the Nature Theatre becomes a symbol for mid-century Hollywood. Like Oklahoma, it signifies a damaged dream. Through Kafka, Adorno sketches out America’s dialectic nature that is steeped in contradictions. The Oklahoma Theatre, functioning as a placeholder for Hollywood’s dream factory, constitutes both fantasy and an awakening to consciousness of the dream’s mere appearance (Schein, or illusion).

Around the same period as he wrote the above passage, Adorno was also completing his essay “Notes on Kafka” (1953), where he again returns to the Oklahoma Theatre:

Adorno continues to reflect on the reifying effects of modernity. In opposition to the “land of the future,” when Adorno arrives in LA he highlights the obsolescence of the New World. The culture industry drags the modern subject into its mass of refuse. In Adorno’s litany of forsaken spaces – including the bottom of stairs, auto graveyards, Oklahoma, and America itself – all of these places constitute a no-man’s-land steeped in potential ruination. Adorno replaces Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit with “the phenomenon of obsolescence,” whereby the resurrection of the dead – if it were to transpire – would occur in auto graveyards, not at Golgotha as it does for Hegel.

Adorno’s above descriptions become animated in Frank’s collection, specifically in his photographs taken of the culture industry in southern California. Like Adorno’s depiction of Kafka’s literature, Frank’s world of images is “sad and dilapidated,” comprising “stale goods and forsaken spots.” Even when he travels to California – the destination of those who migrated from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl – Frank’s photographs situate us in a similar predicament of ruins, alienation, and decay. The movement out west does not promise a narrative of historical progress. Instead, we see the castaways who have taken refuge within the detritus of Los Angeles. These figures are the outcasts from the American dream. For every photograph taken at a Hollywood movie premiere, there are isolated figures in ticket booths or walking the streets of downtown LA. The cultural industrial debris of modernity – its objects and consumers – becomes Frank’s focal point.

Frank’s photography stands at the crossroads of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s philosophical fragments on modernity’s ruins. Challenging any grand narrative about sociohistorical progress in his desultory arrangement of photographs, Frank’s methodology is wedded to how the two approach a philosophy of history. By arresting the fragmented and decaying aspects of contemporary postwar American society, Frank’s photography offers an intersection between Adorno’s and Benjamin’s philosophical investigation of ruins. His photographs embody visually the dialectical images behind the historical, cultural, and societal disintegration in the modern world. Dialectical images are a method Benjamin uses to understand history not as a continuous flow but as a constellation of moments that reveal deeper truths. Often depicting empty streets, isolated figures, automobile wreckage and decaying buildings, Frank uncovers the fragments beneath the surface of American prosperity.

Although Benjamin was unable to flee Europe and complete his final study of the Paris Arcades, which he deemed “the capital of the 19th century,” Frank carries out Benjamin’s ideas in relation to twentieth-century America. At this moment of historical impasse of the 1950s, Frank’s nonnarrative style resonates with what Benjamin calls “dialectics at a standstill,” where traces of the past and present coalesce with one another and a critical reflection on history comes to light. This “standstill” is where the dialectical image appears and signifies a frozen point where the dialectical process stops to reveal the contradictions embedded within history. Both Frank and Benjamin share a historical-materialist approach to the American experience through their allegorical engagement with the melancholic traces within urban spaces.

For the historical materialist, the dream realm is replaced with a space of awakening; forgotten fragments from the past are re-collected in the present and reassembled into something new. The continuity of history is disrupted, and a new historical perspective is formulated through the dialectical image. While Benjamin wishes to “wake up from the 19th century,” Frank tries to stir us from the 1950s through the shock effects of montage to spur a dialectics of awakening from the phantasmagoria of commodity culture and past suffering. Capturing the dichotomy of desolation and affluence as California sunlight merges with Hollywood noir, Frank brings into focus the material decay of the objects he surveys. Ultimately, the detritus of consumer culture extends to the very consumers themselves, who become reified castaways within the urban landscape.

In The Americans Frank includes three photographs from Hollywood, two of them titled “Movie Premiere – Hollywood” and the third titled “Ranch Market – Hollywood.” The purpose is not simply to document Hollywood, but Frank offers a philosophical meditation on image culture and its relation to the myth and disillusionment of the American Dream. Instead of propagating what Benjamin would refer to as the aura of the Hollywood star, Frank goes about dismantling this very aura and exposing the machinery behind its construction. Photography, for Benjamin, becomes a tool for dialectical seeing. Frank does not enchant us with the image of Hollywood, but his goal is to awaken us to the myth behind the culture industry. In his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Benjamin develops his concept of the aura, which refers to the unique presence, authority, and authenticity of a work of art or object that is rooted in its singularity. When applied to Frank’s photographs of the movie premiere, we see a deliberate dismantling of the aura of the Hollywood star and the spectacle surrounding her. Frank uses photography – ironically, the very medium Benjamin thought could destroy aura – to reveal how aura itself is manufactured in modern mass culture.

The first image in The Americans located in Hollywood is titled “Movie Premiere – Hollywood.” It is a photograph of Kim Novak in profile standing before a ticket booth outside a movie theatre. It was taken during the premiere for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). With her sculpted jawline, elegant clothes, and jewelry, Frank depicts the glamorized ideal of youth, fame, and success associated with Hollywood. While the inscription of “Hollywood” immediately conjures up a supposed aura of excitement, Frank captures instead the dehumanizing effects of the culture industry’s commodification of its stars. Wrapped in a mink shawl, she is a cross between a mannequin and statue. Cut off from others, she has a forlorn, detached look on her face, appearing less like a person than as the flat glowing surface of an advertisement or cardboard cutout. Her presence is reduced to a commodity, her aura disenchanted.

It is essential to read this image next to a second photograph from a Hollywood premiere, but this time Frank leaves the star’s image out of focus. Frank uses a shallow depth of field so that only certain planes are sharp – notably the faces of the fans – while the starlet’s face is a blur. This inversion of expected focus is critical to the photograph’s message: it subverts the visual hierarchy that Hollywood thrives on. We see instead the idolizing spectators. The photograph contrasts sharply with the flashy images that the culture industry promotes. While the actor in the foreground takes up two thirds of the frame, Frank obscures her face, bringing into focus behind her the adoring crowds drawn to her spectacle. Again, the star’s aura undergoes a dissolution through both the use of the blur and Frank’s privileging of the crowds. His decentering of the celebrity mimics Benjamin’s desire for a post-auratic culture, where mass images provoke awareness of the very machinery behind the fabrication of the star’s aura. One of the most striking features of the photograph is the legible advertisement for Squire’s (a popular canned-meat product of the period) positioned in the background between the star’s face and the heads of the crowd. The sign becomes an unintended banner that brands the event – and, by extension, the people and spectacle below – with its connotation of mass consumption. Similarly, the starlet is herself but another commodity to be consumed: her supposed aura replaced with an advertisement for canned pork.

The significance of these two photographs lies in the way Frank treats his subjects. Rather than emphasizing the allure and charisma of celebrities, he captures moments of isolation and the artificiality of Hollywood culture. By photographing Hollywood stars, Frank draws attention to the contrast between the image-obsessed, surface-level culture of celebrity and the social inequalities he documents throughout The Americans. Ultimately, Frank’s photographs of Hollywood reflect the ways in which America’s culture of celebrity obfuscates the deep-rooted societal issues like poverty, racism, and social isolation which he captured in other areas around the country.Footnote ²¹

There is a third photograph in The Americans from Hollywood titled “Ranch Market – Hollywood” that conveys this very sense of disenchantment. The photograph taken inside the Ranch Market is in stark contrast to Hollywood as the embodiment of America’s dream machine: a place that manufactures fantasy, celebrity, beauty, and endless reinvention. By choosing to photograph not outside a studio or near a movie set, but inside a market, Frank turns the gaze away from the glitz and directly into the ordinary mechanics of American consumer life. I would argue that Frank’s photograph of the waitress inside the market provides another critique of the culture industry. She stands at the counter, and her visage is one of isolation. Her portrait resembles those of the two Hollywood stars. Despite the socioeconomic contrast between star and waitress, each appears as a reified figure within consumer culture. Embodying the failure of the California Dream, the waitress is stuck behind the counter performing repetitive labor in a consumer-driven society. We see three quarters of her face; her painted lips are pursed and her long hair rests on her apron. Positioned in the mediator role between customer and mass-produced products, she stands in front of advertisements for “Jumbo Size Hot Dogs.” Her face is positioned directly between the racks of products. Her eyes look far away as if wondering how she arrived at this point. Above her gleams an image of a smiling Santa Claus wishing us a Merry Christmas, but there is nothing joyous in this seasonal photograph. Like Santa Claus, Hollywood is itself a fantasy world.

The waitress reflects the culture industry’s emphasis on homogenization and the reduction of individuals to mere cogs in the machine of mass production, whether it is in goods (Hollywood star) or services (waitress). Like other workers that Frank captures in the service industry, she signifies how people are dehumanized in a culture focussed on consumption and conformity. Despite the socioeconomic fissure between the Hollywood star and the waitress, Frank conveys a sense of mortification in both scenes. By critiquing the culture industry’s promises of happiness and potential success, he reveals the disappointment that often lies underneath the surface of the American Dream. In Frank’s work, Hollywood becomes a symbol of the broader disenchantment with postwar American ideals of prosperity: the pursuit of fame and success often ends in scenes of stagnation.

Two years after his travels out west for The Americans, Frank returned to southern California for a photograph exposition for Esquire. Nowhere is this mortification of objects, signs, and language itself more evident in Frank’s photographs of California than in those of the Hollywood sign, which he took during his second trip there in 1958; they bear a striking resemblance to those taken during his travels for The Americans. While Frank took over seventy shots of the sign, only one was used in an Esquire magazine feature on Hollywood in 1959 titled “A Hard Look at the New Hollywood.”Footnote ²² The photograph of the sign accompanies Orson Welles’s article “Twilight in the Smog,” which examines the supposed decay of the movie industry with the rise of television. While his photograph exposé begins with the glamour of a film premiere – a shot from behind of a starlet’s svelte body wrapped in a long black evening gown and furs – another caption to two photographs reads “Rise of TV, decline of films”: we see a smiling television announcer contrasted with the bored face of a young ticket taker at a movie theatre. Elsewhere, an empty and decaying swimming pool filled with leaves reflects a gaudy glamour from the past, while a winding stairwell on a backlot set sits in ruins next to a photograph of an old woman carrying a portrait of the silent film star Rudolph Valentino at a yearly commemorative event.

The sign must have had some profound significance for Frank, considering that there are over seventy outtakes of the site on three contact sheets. In these dozens of photographs, the images shift between one and three letters (H, O, and L). The sign, rendered into something ruin-like, becomes legible in its fragmented state and conveys from behind something strikingly different than its original intention. Frank takes one of the most iconic symbols of American culture and disfigures it, thereby transforming the advertisement that sells the commodity of the dream factory into an allegorical ruin. We only see the letter “H” as we peer downward toward the smog-consumed city. Even without the inscription (“Hollywood, 1958”) we know where we are. It is one of the most recognized advertisements in the world. From within the city, the sign conjures a transcendence of the imagination, of having reached some paradise as we look up toward the Hollywood Hills. But Frank does not take any vacation-style shots. Instead, he travels to the top of the canyon to snap photographs of the sign up close and from behind. While Frank has a bird’s-eye view from atop the canyon, we see the smog below and the fragmented sign’s unglamorous backside. Originally used as a housing advertisement in the 1920s, one of the most iconic billboards in the world is transformed by Frank into a disenchanted cultural artifact.

The traditional photograph shot from below is replaced with an unfamiliar angle; we see a sliver of the “O” and the weeds and shrubbery around the letter “H,” buttressed by two planks and scaffolding. The familiar incandescent glow of the letters is replaced with its dreary backside. By shooting the dilapidated fragment of the sign from behind as he looks down on the city, Frank turns this familiar advertisement into a dialectic image. While advertisements purposely obscure their deceptive nature, insisting that what they represent can be obtained, Frank supplants this fantasy and provokes us to read the sign anew. No longer an image of transcendence propagated by Hollywood’s dream factory, Frank wishes to bring to light the deceptive nature of the sign and reveal the fantasy behind it. The “H” sits atop the Hollywood hills like a tomb overlooking the disenchanted city below.

Like his previous images from Hollywood, the photograph functions as a visual allegory for Benjamin’s argument regarding the dissolution of the aura: reproduction and reframing can desacralize cultural icons, making them ordinary, even disenchanted. The Hollywood sign’s aura resides in its mythic, iconic front-facing view: perched on the hillside and glowing over Los Angeles, it symbolizes glamour, stardom, and sought-for dreams. From this perspective, it is untouchable, distant, almost sacred. While the aura requires distance – we gaze at the sign from afar, as if it were an idol – Frank collapses that distance by bringing us into proximity and photographing the sign from its hidden backside. We no longer gaze up at a dazzling symbol, but see the scaffolding and rusting supports that prop up the illusion. Instead of facing us with its radiant promise, the sign is turned away and exposed as a decaying structure on a desolate hillside. Although Hollywood is the very machine that produces modern myths and illusions, Frank, through his perspective, demythologizes it. Frank’s photograph of the sign from behind disenchants its aura by denying the viewer the iconic, myth-laden image and replacing it with the sign’s exposed, material, workaday infrastructure. Frank brings us into an anti-mythic closeness where Hollywood is revealed as mere scaffolding, not auratic transcendence.

But Frank’s behind-the-scenes image of the Hollywood sign is more than just an anti-glamour shot; it is also a dialectical image in Benjamin’s fullest sense. The dismantling of Hollywood’s aura opens up a space through which the dialectical image emerges and reveals historical truth through a sudden, fractured perspective. In a single frame, Frank conveys the tension between appearance and reality, future hope and present decay. As he stages a visual critique of American mythmaking, Frank allows us to see what the dream is made of and what it leaves behind. In Benjaminian terms, the photograph stops time. It does not just document this iconic space; rather Frank turns it into a flashpoint where the image exposes history’s contradictions: the promise of fame versus the machinery behind it, the visible dream versus the hidden infrastructure. Thus the artifice of Hollywood and, by extension, American capitalist ideology are rendered transparent and unstable.

Although Frank’s photographs span the entire country, his engagement with Los Angeles in particular provides a revealing critique of the reurbanization and changing urban landscapes of the postwar period. During the 1950s, Los Angeles was undergoing a profound transformation. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the city expanded rapidly due to the influx of federal defense spending, the growth of the aerospace and automobile industries, and a booming suburban housing market. At the same time, the city was becoming increasingly fragmented by freeway construction, racial segregation, and the displacement of working-class communities, particularly in areas targeted for redevelopment such as Bunker Hill. Frank’s photographs anticipate by over three decades what Mike Davis examines in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Suggesting that Los Angeles embodies a type of American urban dystopia, Davis highlights a widening chasm between the wealthy elite and the struggling working-class and homeless populations in Los Angeles.Footnote ²³ Like Davis, Frank turns to what lies beneath the surface mythologies of LA, working to expose the contradictions of the city as a site of promise and illusion, dream and exclusion. With Davis’s framework in mind, we can read Frank’s Los Angeles photographs as early visual evidence of the city’s social fragmentation, racial and class divisions, and spiritual malaise. These images do not romanticize the West Coast dream; instead, they suggest urban anonymity, fragmentation, and a deep unease beneath the surface prosperity.

In addition to the images of young women ensconced in Hollywood’s machinery, Frank includes many images of old men who had perhaps come to California from elsewhere seeking a better life and opportunities. These figures are consistent with those individuals who migrated out west in the interwar period in search of the Golden State and the allure of wealth for the American middle class. In one series of images, Frank spent a day photographing the dilapidated neighborhood and lonely figures around Bunker Hill, located near downtown LA. Their bodies often interact with the textual traces of the city, including street signs, advertisements, and billboards that have become reified, evocative of Frank’s photographs of the de-auratized Hollywood sign. The photographs around Bunker Hill point to the transformation of American urban spaces in the mid-twentieth century. Once an affluent section of LA in the early twentieth century, by the 1950s Bunker Hill had become a decaying neighborhood that was populated by working-class residents and immigrants. Frank captures Bunker Hill just before it underwent massive urban redevelopment in the late 1950s and the 1960s. During this period, much of the area was razed and reconstructed with office buildings and modern high-rises. Frank composes a stirring visual archive of a neighborhood on the brink of erasure as he critiques the societal forces that prioritize modernization over recognition of the suffering of others.

In photographing Bunker Hill, Frank depicts the dissonance between old and new, tradition and progress, nostalgia and the harsh realities of modernization. This fading, neglected part of Los Angeles fits into his vision of recording a different America, one that exists on the margins of the country’s celebrated postwar prosperity and idealized visions. In “Rooming House – Bunker Hill, Los Angeles” Frank snaps a picture of an old man, who is partially hidden behind a rickety wooden staircase of a boarding house. His face and the upper half of his body are concealed by the stairs; it is as if he is undergoing a vanishing. Bent over and holding a cane, his posture matches that of the faux Doric column holding up part of the stairwell. Both the dilapidated structure and its inhabitant reflect an air of decline. We are at another one of the “forsaken spots” that Adorno and Benjamin discuss in their respective Kafka essays: beneath the stairwell is where Kafka situates his misshaped creature Odradek, who is neither alive nor dead.Footnote ²⁴ Likewise, Frank’s figure evokes a sense of being both present and absent.

But Frank’s California is less a “grave of the occident,” as described by Susan Sontag, than, to use a phrase of Adorno’s, “a no man’s land.” Sontag describes how Frank waits for the moment to reveal a disequilibrium, “to catch reality off-guard,” and Frank refers to these shots as “in-between moments.”Footnote ²⁵ Frank’s photographs are more aligned with Adorno’s “no man’s land” – where the figures are neither dead nor living – than with a tomb. Adorno refers to this no man’s land in his essay on Beckett’s Endgame: “The play takes place in a no man’s land, a zone of indifference between inner and outer. What remains of these two in a state of complete alienation.”Footnote ²⁶ The figures are suspended between obsolescence and redemption. Elsewhere, in his study of Kafka, Adorno writes, “The zone in which it is impossible to die is also the no man’s land between man and thing.”Footnote ²⁷ Adorno sees the “Beckettian no man’s land” as being located not literally “after death,” but rather in a “realm between life and death.”Footnote ²⁸ Describing a state where the boundaries between human subjectivity and the inanimate world blur, this “no man’s land” is a metaphor for a kind of dehumanized existence, where people become more like objects, devoid of depth, autonomy or transcendence.

Frank brings these figures to our attention throughout The Americans, and in particular in the environs of Bunker Hill. Situated between home and not-home, the claustrophobic space of the rooming house constitutes an Unheimlichkeit: it is an uncanny space of impermanence, inhabited by individuals on society’s fringes. Like the cheap housing in which he dwells, the old man’s presence in this specific location connects him to a narrative of urban decay, in which his personal mortification is tied to a larger sociocultural deterioration. By focussing on a rundown rooming house instead of the extravagant symbols of wealth of a city synonymous with the entertainment industry, Frank draws attention to the glaring differences between the city’s celebrated image and its often overlooked realities.

An area on the brink of erasure under postwar urban redevelopment, Frank’s photographs of Bunker Hill capture a landscape in transition and decay. In Adorno’s analyses of Kafka and Beckett, the no-man’s-land reflects the modern condition associated with the anomie of late capitalism in which the individual is caught in a system that renders him both present and estranged, visible and unmoored. Opening up a moment of historical suspension, Frank captures the atmosphere of erasure marked by the absence of clear subjectivity or community. The anonymous figure is himself disappearing as his face is concealed behind the stairwell.Footnote ²⁹ It is a displaced life, emptied of traditional social coordinates. Bunker Hill becomes an in-between world, a city waiting to disappear, but not yet gone. It is not a place of historical continuity, but of temporal rupture, a space stripped of meaning or rootedness, where individuals drift or exist without orientation as they undergo an erasure. This visual moment of in-betweenness – like Adorno’s no-man’s-land – is not simply a transition, but signifies the existential experience of hovering outside progress and disinherited from the space once called home. Thus Bunker Hill becomes a dialectical image: a real place that also stands for the catastrophic logic of modern progress, where people and places are rendered obsolete in the name of development.

In another photograph taken downtown, simply titled “Los Angeles,” Frank is positioned above a city street on a retention wall and snaps a picture of a solitary man, positioned between two cracks in the sidewalk, in midstride beneath a massive neon arrow sign fixed to the side of a brick building. Despite the photograph’s terse inscription, Frank was actually in the Bunker Hill neighborhood. Frank took five different shots of the arrow, employing a wide-shot perspective of the city’s horizon lined with palm trees and peering toward the Hollywood Hills. Although the pedestrian is missing from the other outtakes, each of the five shots centers on the arrow. While the arrow provided direction for a motel down the street, it also symbolically gestures to the notion of temporal movement or progress. However, the arrow, hovering over the man’s body, appears to banish him from the frame. Instead of directing him toward some optimistic future, he becomes an exile in the empty urban landscape.

In The Arcades Project, Benjamin conceives of the modern city as a textual field; it is a place to be “read” through its objects, architecture, advertisements, and ruins. The city becomes a palimpsest, bearing remnants from the past and present. Just as Benjamin instructs us to read the city as a field of symbolic and material signs, Frank’s photographs become legible texts in this framework. Each image behaves like a poetic fragment in a city caught between memory and its erasure in modernity. Evocative of how Benjamin reads the Paris arcades, Frank’s LA is not a place we move through easily, but one in which we must read slowly. The arrow operates as a dialectical image, creating a moment of stasis that invites contemplation. While the arrow supposedly gives direction, the anonymous figure appears lost in the modern city’s vastness, thereby reflecting Benjamin’s interest in those individuals left out of traditional histories. For Benjamin, they are the people who live on the margins of grand historical narratives but are crucial to understanding modern society’s oppressive conditions. By arresting this moment, Frank calls on us to reflect on the forces of modernity and urban life, a call similar to Benjamin’s for the historical materialist to expose the fragmentations hidden within the fabric of history.

Because of its desolate surroundings and neon lights, during the 1940s and 1950s Hollywood often shot scenes around Bunker Hill as the setting for numerous films noirs. Frequently employed to enhance the genre’s mysterious atmosphere and themes through either their flickering or harsh glow amidst the urban squalor, neon signs and advertisements are iconic visual elements in film noir.Footnote ³⁰ The high-contrast lighting and angular shapes of neon signs complement the chiaroscuro aesthetic of film noir, with its emphasis on shadows and reflected images. It is only fitting that, as he observes from above the lonely figure, Frank’s perspective is like that of a detective. At the moment of its urban transformation, Frank walks the city’s margins, taking multiple photographs around Bunker Hill to capture its disintegration.

In these mystery-laden scenes, it is as if Frank searches for evidence of an unknown crime, analogous to Benjamin’s description of Eugene Atget’s photographs. Describing Paris’s empty streets and its spectral structures, Benjamin writes, “It has quite justly been said that he photographed them like scenes of crimes. The scene of the crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence.”Footnote ³¹ Benjamin’s description of Atget highlights how his photographs of deserted urban settings embody a sense of ambiguity, much like the aftermath of a crime. His photographs of forgotten spaces reveal hidden aspects of modern life within the metropolis. Frank’s photographs also offer visual evidence without providing context or a straightforward story. We are invited to investigate or “read” the scene for clues, similar to how a detective might search for meaning in the traces left behind by a crime. Frank’s photographic method is itself forensic; he captures urban spaces with the cold, detached eye of someone searching for clues. Like forensic evidence, the photograph does not tell the whole story but presents traces from which we must draw meaning.

Benjamin’s dialectical image arrests time by creating a critical pause through the juxtaposition of temporalities (of past and present) that are caught in a single frozen scene. Hovering in silence in an estranged, emptied environment, on its surface the arrow may signify the flow of historical time. But the point of intersection between arrow and pedestrian is a moment of standstill that opens up a point of historical reflection. The man standing under the arrow suggests a sense of being perpetually on the verge of motion, yet paradoxically immobile, stuck in this in-between state that is comparable to Adorno’s description of a no-man’s-land. Just as Zeno’s paradox suggests that motion is an illusion, Frank’s image hints at the illusion of progress in the life of this man or, more broadly, in the context of urban life in mid-century America. By photographing this single frame of motion, Frank reflects on the impossibility of arrival; much like the person in Zeno’s paradox, the figure is trapped in the increments, walking forever but going nowhere. This moment of standstill functions as a metaphor for halting the momentum of history at a point of crisis, where a radical rethinking and reconfiguration of the past, present, and future can occur.

In addition to taking photographs around Bunker Hill, Frank also spent time wandering the back streets of Venice Beach. Like Bunker Hill, Venice was once an affluent region in southern California and was known as the “Venice of America.” Inspired by Venice, Italy, Venice West was originally designed as a utopian beach resort. But by the 1950s it was labeled “Slum by the Sea.” Eventually, the low-income area of run-down bungalows was occupied by indigent families, European immigrants, and young counterculture artists, including the beats. Frank captures this fall from utopia not with spectacle but through quiet decay. Venice West is not just a place but a symbol of modern disenchantment, a paradise collapsed into ruin. Frank captures a modern kind of ruin: not a grand, historical monument, but an everyday, decaying suburban backyard. Frank’s image depicts an overgrown Venice Beach backyard, imbued with a sense of abandonment. Despite the figure of the reclining man beneath a flag-like covering, the backyard feels melancholic, devoid of life.

The Venice backyard reflects a static, silent, material world where the promise of postwar America has stalled. Like those taken in Bunker Hill, this photograph offers a vision of an exhausted life not moving forward but stuck in its own emotional, social, and historical residue. It shows a ramshackle backyard in the Venice Beach area. A man sits slumped beneath a flag-like canopy in his overgrown and cluttered yard filled with broken furniture, glass jars, discarded garden tools, and a wrecked car. Within the context of Frank’s photograph, the abandoned car is an allegorical ruin, as discussed by Benjamin: mute, decaying, and drained of purpose. Often idolized in American culture, the car is no longer useful but becomes a remnant of the American Dream turned banal and degraded.

In his introduction to The Americans, Kerouac reflects on “Backyard – Venice West”: “Madman resting under American flag canopy in old busted car seat in fantastic Venice, California backyard. I could sit in it and sketch 30,000 words.”Footnote ³² Steeped in a melancholic texture evocative of disparate works of photography, poetry, and painting, there is a profound elegiac tonality in this image, one that, in addition to Kerouac’s vision of 30,000 words, also conjures up numerous literary and visual resonances. For instance, a correspondence opens up between Frank and Walker Evans, in which Frank’s photographs from Bunker Hill and Venice evoke Evans’s series of photographs depicting the rear views of houses. Both men focus on the unseen side of America. Just as Frank captures the cluttered, sun-washed backlot of a southern California residence, Evans’s backsides of houses in Mobile Alabama (1935) similarly turns away from idealized, polished facades. His image depicts the back ends of modest homes, stripped of sentimentality or drama. Exposing the backsides of American life and turning the camera away from spectacle and toward the banal, both works subvert the ideal American image by centering on its literal and figurative reversal. They reveal lived-in spaces where meaning emerges from decay and routine. But while Evans’s aesthetic mission approached photography with a classical detachment, creating objective records of American life, Frank replaces Evans’s objective of clarity and detached observation with instability and poetic ambiguity. The chaotic backyard, harsh light, and cropped framing suggest a world coming undone.Footnote ³³

On first glance, the yard appears as a defiled Edenic space, whose elements also suggest a utopian promise of recovering a lost golden age. But there is a melancholia that evokes Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melancholia I: the figure that inspired Benjamin’s reflections on melancholia in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Trauerspiel). Dürer depicts a winged female figure who sits in apparent dejection by the sea, surrounded by unused objects of science and art, holding a compass as she broods over the desolate scene. Benjamin’s concept of melancholia, particularly as he develops it in his Trauerspiel, offers a compelling interpretive framework for reading Frank’s photograph “Backyard – Venice West.” The image becomes, in Benjaminian terms, a melancholic landscape, where the detritus of everyday life gestures toward lost utopias, failed dreams, and the inner decay of American modernity. Benjamin describes melancholia not just as sadness, but as a philosophical and historical stance; it is a way of seeing the world through the remains of history, the ruins of meaning, and the failure of promised futures. In Benjamin’s Trauerspiel, melancholia appears when objects lose their symbolic or transcendent value and become allegorical fragments.

Frank’s photograph and Dürer’s engraving share a striking thematic and visual connection through symbolic landscapes and arrangements of objects. According to Benjamin, Melancholia I is an allegory of the melancholic temperament, personified by the winged figure seated in a cluttered environment of tools and geometric shapes. In both works, time seems to stand still, reinforcing a melancholic mood of paralysis, in which the flow of time feels arrested. Like the polyhedron in Dürer’s Melancholia, the most prominent feature in Frank’s photograph seems like an anomaly: our attention is drawn to the rusted car covered in weeds. This wrecked machine in the garden corrupts the pastoral-like setting and can be read alongside other photographs Frank takes of automobiles in southern California, such as the Motorama car show and the covered car in Long Beach.Footnote ³⁴ The Motorama car show and its sleek new vehicles are contrasted to those wrecked or covered cars beneath tarpaulins that look like massive corpses. In “Motorama – Los Angeles,” the cars are presented as an idealized vision of the future and embody the postwar optimism that technology and industrial progress would bring endless prosperity. However, Frank’s images of wrecked cars serve as a visual counterpoint, whereby the promise of progress ultimately devolves into ruination.Footnote ³⁵ In contradistinction to the Motorama photograph, Frank’s images of auto graveyards and shattered cars serve as a critique of American consumer culture. Frank exposes the ephemerality beneath modernity’s surface, using the symbol of the automobile to challenge the ideal of prosperity central to the American Dream.

Reminiscent of Adorno’s reflections on Kafka’s Oklahoma Theatre, which was itself a screen for his contemporary California experience, Frank’s LA photographs are devoid of any simple resolution. California becomes yet another auto graveyard, a space of obsolescence and refuse. Similar to Adorno’s description of Kafka, Frank uncovers “a montage of waste-products” as his artworks arise out of the melancholic ruins spread across America’s disfigured landscape. Having travelled as far west as we can, there is no element of resurrection here in this cramped Venice backyard. Bringing to a standstill the interplay between ruination and progress, Frank opens up a space of critique for us to reflect on the dispossessed, exiles, and outcasts of modern American society.

The final aphorism in Minima Moralia, titled “Finale,” contains one of Adorno’s most stirring reflections during his American exile:

Acknowledging the profound despair in the modern world, Adorno articulates his philosophical stance in the face of the horrors of the twentieth century. For Adorno, redemption involves the transformation of the world where the injustices and suffering of the present would be resolved. Philosophy must orient itself toward reflecting on what the world would look like from such a future standpoint. With Adorno’s passage in mind, Frank requires that we estrange ourselves from the status quo in order to visualize the world’s disfigurations. Just as Adorno calls for philosophical reflection that “displaces and estranges” the world, Frank wishes us to see America from a new perspective. Frank, too, is in search of such a standpoint: a perspective comprising rifts, crevices, displacements, and distortions that estranges the world of images propagated by traditional forms of mass media. We do not need to accept the world as it is – that is, one full of injustice – but must see it as fractured and in need of an adjustment. Adorno’s “messianic light” gestures toward such a redemptive future; however, this messianic vision should be understood from a secular perspective, symbolizing the possibility that the fractured state of the present world might be repaired. Similarly to Adorno, Frank sees America as comprising a tension between ruin and redemption. His photographs of southern California provide a space for us to contemplate the contradictions of this topography suspended between Arcadia and acedia, the land of the West and wasteland.

As discussed earlier, Adorno described in his Kafka essay how the resurrection of the dead, if it were to transpire, would have to take place in auto graveyards. This statement fits nicely with Adorno’s claim that philosophy must be practiced from the standpoint of redemption. Benjamin’s influence on Adorno is evident here. Adorno’s “messianic light” builds on Benjamin’s emphasis in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” on the need to seize “weak messianic power” to interrupt the catastrophic flow of history.Footnote ³⁷ Adorno’s “Finale” passage and Benjamin’s figure of the Angel of History share a profound skepticism toward the modern conception of progress. The new perspective that Adorno enjoins us to find – similar to the Angel’s gaze at a pile of ruins – is contained within such secular spaces as auto graveyards and overgrown backyards, beneath dilapidated stairwells and neon signs.

Frank snaps pictures in these forlorn spaces, no-man’s-lands that are suspended between life and death, ruin and renewal, and sleep and awakening: moments configured by a dialectics at a standstill, where the postwar American landscape was at once a land of optimism, but also of alienation, inequality, and unfulfilled promises. The collision of these binaries leaves the question of redemption open-ended. Can the ruins be rebuilt into something better, or does the wreckage represent the inevitable failure of society’s dreams? Adorno’s depiction of a no-man’s-land and his attraction to forlorn spaces are the kind of places that Frank himself is drawn to. But he is there not to resurrect the dead; instead, Frank’s perspective is similar to Benjamin’s Angel of History, who looks back at history and sees not a linear progression of human achievements, but a chaotic pile of debris: the wreckage of past catastrophes. In the “City of Angels,” Frank occupies the role of the Angel of History with a camera. While the Angel would like to awaken the dead, for Frank, it is us whom he wishes to awaken as we behold an amassing of debris. The Angel’s perspective is steeped in melancholia as it witnesses the continuous piling up of wreckage that history leaves in its wake. Frank sifts through similar ruins of this history in the thousands of photographs he takes throughout postwar America. His photographs do not celebrate the optimism or prosperity of this period but instead reveal the fractures in society caused by economic disparities, Cold War anxieties, and racial tensions.

I will conclude with two photographs Frank took in Los Angeles. Both are inflected with a religious quality that Frank ultimately subverts. Frank examines such a contradiction between ruin and redemption in “Jehovah’s Witness – Los Angeles “and “St. Francis, Gas Station, and City Hall – Los Angeles.” While religious themes are present throughout The Americans, these two photographs contrast personal faith and the modern urban landscape. In turn, elements of the sacred shift to Benjamin’s notion of profane illumination. In his Americans and the California Dream series, the cultural historian Kevin Starr treats religion as part of California’s larger dream culture. Starr highlights how migration after the Second World War by Midwestern Protestants, southern evangelicals, Mexican Catholics, and Japanese Americans made California a space of religious pluralism and a spiritual frontier in America. Linking this pluralism to California’s relatively easy acceptance of new religious movements, Starr perceives the “California Dream” as essentially a secular faith: the belief that life can continually be improved. According to Starr, religion in California during the 1950s was not isolated from culture; rather, churches, temples, and new religious movements became engines of community building and expressions of the same imaginative optimism that shaped Hollywood, the aerospace industry and the suburban spread of southern California.Footnote ³⁸ Postwar California was a laboratory of religious pluralism, where migrants brought a wide array of faith traditions and new religious movements could flourish. Frank’s camera documents the very pluralism that Starr historicizes, turning his narrative of demographic change into the visible texture of photography.

But while Starr shows the optimism of 1950s faith, Frank offers us the visual counterpoint, revealing how religion can be humble, lonely, or ambiguous. For instance, although Starr highlights a California Dream of progress and prosperity, Frank’s photograph of the Jehovah’s Witness quietly questions that dream, as if the figure preaches a message of impending apocalypse and spiritual urgency in LA. Starr examines how new religious movements occupied cultural margins yet became part of the state’s religious fabric. In his Jehovah’s Witness photograph, Frank’s figure is on the literal margins of the sidewalk; we see an old man standing alone in front of a nondescript building. His body looks small as if Frank took the photograph from an elevated and oblique angle. His askew body rests against lines resembling a crucifix on the wall behind him. He holds a pamphlet with the moniker “Awake!” Frank, in turn, directs the imperative toward us. He undermines the notion of redemption in modernity by capturing a moment that reflects the futility of spiritual promises within a commercialized society. Even religion has become a commodity within the urban landscape. While the man’s product is salvation through God, there is a scant difference between his pamphlet and the pervasive billboards and advertisements throughout the city that attest to the commodification of daily life.

Representing a religious presence within the urban landscape, the Jehovah’s Witness creates a disconnect through his juxtaposition with LA’s secular space: the man seems out of place, or, to use Adorno’s terminology, he is an Entstellung (distortion or displacement) within the modern city. Holding up his sign, he is like an apostle warning of some impending doom within the city. But it is Frank who takes on the role of the witness and commands his audience to awaken from its fantasy world of dreams constructed by the culture industry and America’s own myths about itself. Within the context of Frank’s photograph, the pamphlet is not about an awakening from spiritual slumber, but a call to become aware of the alienation of others in modern urban environments.

The collision between the secular and religious occurs again in “St. Francis, Gas Station, and City Hall – Los Angeles.” The title itself comprises a trinity that connects religion with commodity culture and politics. The statue stands atop a pedestal and, with its raised cross, appears to be blessing the gas station and car lot across the street. Hanging close to the horizon, the sun is immersed in a haze – the very waste product of car culture – as it hovers behind the gas station. The photograph approaches visually Benjamin’s notion of profane illumination, which stresses the collapse of traditional boundaries between the sacred and the everyday. Frank’s focus on religious imagery throughout The Americans reflects this approach by placing sacred symbols – crosses, funerals, and people praying – in secular environments.

The cross is positioned above the setting sun, which is encased in a late afternoon haze of LA smog hovering over the sea. Frank’s ability to find the sacred in the profane mirrors Benjamin’s belief that modernity’s ruins contain their own forms of revelation. By transforming religious symbols into vehicles for secular revelation, Frank asks viewers to uncover meaning in the fragmented, material realities of mid-twentieth-century America. Dwarfed by its industrial surroundings, the statue is positioned in a threshold space that opens up a moment of profane illumination. There is an intersection between Adorno’s no-man’s-land and Benjamin’s Angel, whereby Frank himself occupies this in-between space and snaps a scene of urban ruins: the amassing of cars lined up behind the auto shop across the street evokes Adorno’s auto graveyards.

By contrasting a symbol of spiritual salvation (St. Francis) with the prosaic environment of a gas station, Frank’s juxtaposition again invites us to question whether redemption is possible in a world dominated by commerce and industrialization. St. Francis, the saint of humility, represents ideals that stand in contrast to the material world, especially in LA. Frank contrasts the opulence contained in the name “Los Angeles” with a figure associated with impoverishment. Yet, in Frank’s photograph, he is reduced to a static relic surrounded by symbols of modern life. The statue does not appear to survey this gloomy landscape – a veritable no-man’s-land of car lots, an empty intersection, gas station, disconsolate sky and buildings ascending like tombs in the backdrop – but Frank himself, who snaps the photograph. The saint’s isolation within this setting suggests that spiritual redemption has become marginalized in a society increasingly propelled by consumer culture. On its surface, the statue of St. Francis represents a sacred image connected to the themes of humility, poverty, and the natural world. But the LA setting is denatured. Even the leaden sky is rendered lifeless within this industrialized urban environment. The sacred gives way to the commodified reality of postwar American society.

Frank requires us to adopt a historical-materialist approach to his photograph. Reading history against the grain, the historical materialist reveals the power structures, social relations, and concealed narratives ingrained in seemingly quotidian details. In effect, historical materialism is a form of detective work. Similar to how a detective reconfigures a narrative from traces, the historical materialist reconstructs history not as a sequence of facts but as a complex matrix of ideas formed by ideological forces. They scrutinize artifacts, texts, and images to reconstruct hidden meanings and challenge dominant narratives. In relation to Frank’s photograph of the statue, we ourselves become detectives to uncover its true identity: it is actually of St. Junipero Serra, the patron saint of California, who founded numerous missions in the eighteenth century during the Spanish occupation of the area. History’s forgotten or repressed traces rise to the surface of the statue as a dialectical image, thereby seizing a moment that holds both past and present in tension and offering a flash of insight that challenges conventional narratives.

In investigating the statue’s location, we take on the role of the historical materialist as we follow Frank’s path through the city. The statue was in front of the court annex (not city hall), and Frank took several other frontal shots of the statue. By uncovering Frank’s misnaming of the statue, we behold the collision between continuity and rupture, ruin and redemption. In turn, this opens up a critical reimagining of the historical meaning behind the photograph. The disjunction is not only fixed to the blurring between the sacred and the profane, but in the very name of the statue itself. The original meaning is destabilized. Estranging the statue’s identity, Frank draws our attention to the buried history behind it: California’s colonial past and genocidal violence toward its Indigenous communities.

Frank’s misnaming of the statue of St. Junípero Serra as St. Francis can be considered a misprision; it is a creative misreading of the image that discloses hidden layers of meaning behind the photograph.Footnote ³⁹ Whether intentional or not, Frank’s misprision helps transform the statue’s meaning into something new by creating a sense of ambiguity around the statue’s function within the landscape. A tension between St. Francis’s impoverishment and humility contrasts with St. Serra’s legacy linked to colonial violence. History’s forgotten or repressed traces rise to the surface of the image. By misnaming the statue, Frank repeats the distortions behind contemporary American society that he critiques throughout his collection and underscores the sanitization of history. The misprision points to the schism between the ideal (the saint of humility) and an ominous reality (the saint who was behind California’s colonization and oppression of Indigenous peoples).

With the cross looming above the cityscape, on its surface the photograph conveys a narrative of redemption. But the misprision draws our attention to the actual figure depicted in the monument: St. Serra. Adorno posits that one’s perspective needs to both displace and estrange the world in order for the messianic light to one day appear. One way Frank creates such a distortion is through his misnaming of the statue, in which the figure linked to colonial power and violence is elided by the name of the impoverished St. Francis. The misprision becomes part of a broader critique of American society’s relationship to its history. The statue’s double identity juxtaposes catastrophe (Serra) with potential redemption (Francis).

The opening section of this study began with an analysis of Hegel’s philosophy of history in relation to America as “the land of the future.” At first glance, there is something Hegelian in the image of the statue with spread arms looking toward the setting sun. We have come to the endpoint of Manifest Destiny, once we reach the dead end of the Pacific. One recalls Hegel’s owl of Minerva, where he writes, “When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old … The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”Footnote ⁴⁰ However, at this moment of historical reflection transpiring at dusk, when Hegel’s owl of Minerva takes flight, Frank does not capture a moment of reason in history. Instead, situated in this no-man’s-land of LA, the viewpoint is more aligned with Benjamin’s Angel. His photographs are less about a linear development than about a piling up of ruins. The Hegelian understanding of history as a narrative of progress is, for Benjamin, a myth that covers up an endless repetition of catastrophes.

His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet … The storm irresistibly propels into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.Footnote ⁴¹

If The Americans, along with its 27,000 outtakes, is like the wreckage piling up before Benjamin’s Angel, Los Angeles – the center of the culture industry – becomes the standpoint or no-man’s-land for us to access the unresolved interplay between ruin and redemption. It is Frank, not the saint, who stands with arm extended and camera in hand to grab hold of this moment of profane illumination.

The statue’s concealed history circles back to one of Frank’s major themes: the legacy of racism in the United States. In a collection that includes numerous shots of Black people he took during his travels, it is striking that there are no photographs of Black men, women, and children, or other minorities, in southern California. Although Frank does not explicitly document policies like redlining or displacement, his work implicitly critiques the racial and class divides reinforced by reurbanization. The very absence of people of color in these photographs illustrates the inequities built into the city’s changing form. Many redevelopment projects in LA during the 1950s displaced communities of color under the guise of modernization.Footnote ⁴² Operating similarly to his multiple images of Blacks in the American South, the misprision of the statue’s name draws our attention to the concealed history of violence woven into California’s origins. The misnaming gestures to the perpetuation of historical narratives that bypass marginalized groups and their suffering, thus awakening us to the statue’s Entstellung; it is both a displacement and disfiguration.

If one were to go to the space in the city where the image was taken, the statue would be missing, and the street would be renamed. While Frank may capture a specific moment in 1956 regarding the statue’s relation to its contemporary surroundings, its supposed symbolic permanence dissolves, thus destabilizing meaning. We need to consider the contradictions inherent to the statue: it is reified, but its history also entails a transformation. Like most of the sites he photographed in and around LA, the topography and specific markers have undergone a transformation through urban renewal. In this city section, Sunset Boulevard was renamed Cesar Chavez Boulevard to memorialize the civil rights activist. The statue was relocated in 1995 to Father Serra Park but was eventually torn down in an act of civil disobedience during the George Floyd protests in May 2020 to show the Native American community’s solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. The statue itself has become but another ruin upon the landscape. All that remains is its empty pedestal. To use Adorno’s terminology again, it has become a Riss or Schrunde (rift or crevice) within the urban topography, whereby the reification of history collapses into fragmentary ruins.

In the following passage from Slouching towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion captures this moment of standstill in Frank’s photographs,

Her description, evocative of the dialectical standstill, is a fitting inscription to Frank’s series of photographs from southern California, where he interweaves this binary opposition between progress and collapse. At this point of suspension between boom and loss that opens up a moment of brooding reflection, we realize that we’ve reached a vanishing point as the idealized veneer is stripped away. Beneath this “immense bleached sky … where we run out of continent,” it is only fitting that Frank takes a series of photographs of covered cars along the California coast. The emphasis on mobility and wealth is replaced with scenes of stasis. Like Nathanael West’s pronouncement of how people “had come to California to die,” Frank subverts the utopian view of the West as a place of rejuvenation. Even the automobiles in his photographs are like cadavers. Similar to the ones he took in Long Beach, in “Covered Car – Malibu,” a thin stretch of the dreary gray sky blends with the ripples of the Pacific; a few figures stand on the shore’s edge.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the foreground, a parked car is covered in a shroud-like tarp. The idealized seascape is disrupted as the waste products of commodity culture wash up by the beach.

With its expansive sea, leaden sky, and geometric shape, the photograph’s composition is again similar to Dürer’s Melancholia I. Frank stands in the position of the winged figure, the compass replaced with his Leica. However, unlike the melancholic figure whose creativity remains paralyzed, the desolate scene becomes a catalyst for Frank’s artwork. Like the wrecked one in the Venice backyard, the car sits like a ruin within the landscape. Its missing features transform it into a sculptural abstraction like Dürer’s polyhedron. It is not the mystery of what lies beneath the tarp that interests us; rather, Frank compels us to decipher its allegorical meaning within the context of his photograph and the volume as a whole. He brings us to a moment of standstill where we need to unpack the relation between the immobilized auto and the vast ocean.

After turning quotidian elements into profound visual traces throughout his collection, Frank remarked, “It is important to see what is invisible to others. Perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness.”Footnote ⁴⁵ But Kerouac’s “crazed voyageur of the lone automobile” does not remain out West. He heads north to San Francisco and then eastward back across America. Not having time to reflect on what the images symbolize, he leaves it to us to decipher the significance of what lies tangled in the backyard weeds of Venice, hidden beneath the ruins of a stairwell in Bunker Hill or concealed in a parking lot in LA. For Frank, southern California is neither Sontag’s “grave of the occident” nor one of the other place names used to describe the West Coast: Arcadia, “the New Byzantium,” El Dorado, promised land or land of sunshine. Hovering somewhere between these antipodes, California is a no-man’s-land from where Frank, the mid-century Angel of History, surveys the flotsam of American culture.