Robert Frank's The Americans still shocks, 50 years on

First published in France in 1958 and – to considerable controversy – in America the following year, The Americans remains one of the most important photography books of the 20th century. “It is difficult to remember how shocking Robert Frank’s book was,” the late, great John Szarkowski wrote in 1968, having curated an earlier show of the work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “The pictures took us by ambush then … He established a new iconography for contemporary America, comprised of bits of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces.”