nation that is premised on an idea—not on an alleged shared bloodline or eons of history on common acreage—is prone to periodically question exactly who and what it is. The matter that binds Americans, as much as any doctrine or document, is the pursuit of a definition of who Americans are. There are facile adjectives applied to us—optimistic, volatile, swaggering—but they more often seem to apply to pretensions that we wear before the world. Who we are in our unguarded moments, and even what portion of people are included in the word we, is another matter entirely. This is part of the reason that Robert Frank’s photographic essay “The Americans,” published in France in 1958 and released in the U.S. a year later, is both an indelible reflection of American culture and one of the works that helped define it. To produce it, Frank, who died this week, at the age of ninety-four, spent two years scouring the country in a used car, courtesy of a Guggenheim grant, a contrail of dust his most constant companion.

Robert Frank’s The Americans greatly influenced the course of 20th and 21st-century photography. His contemporaries, and those who followed, reflect on the enduring significance of his work

The photographer Robert Frank died on Monday, on Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia. He was ninety-four. Frank’s pictures were spontaneous and imperfect—usually grainy and overexposed, often crooked—yet consistently devastating to behold. I bought his best-known book, “The Americans,” when I was sixteen, in part because Jack Kerouac had written the introduction, and I was young enough to still be thoroughly and guilelessly enraptured by Kerouac’s beautiful, ecstatic ideas about personal freedom. Frank shot the book in 1955 and 1956, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to crisscross the country in a Ford Business Coupe, with his 35-mm. Leica camera and hundreds of rolls of film. He was always looking—peering in and out of windows, ducking around corners, lingering off to the side of the action. There is something furtive and nearly supernatural about his photographs. It often feels as if his pictures aren’t of vistas or faces or rooms, but of secret American feelings. “He sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world,” Kerouac wrote.

It may be impossible to convey to people who weren’t percipient in the early nineteen-sixties the profound, exulting shock that Robert Frank’s “The Americans” delivered to me, among many others, at the time of its release. The book, which was published in the United States in 1959, ranked with Dylan, Warhol, and Motown as a revelation something like a celestial visitation and something like being knocked off a cliff into a free fall so giddy as to obviate any fret about hard landings. The toughest part, from today’s perspective, was that the impact of Frank’s pictures had only passingly to do with their social, political, and otherwise thematic content, now so serviceable to this or that mode of critique. We were formalists then, and anti-formalists—not alternatively but both at once. Frank had exalted photographic form by shattering it against the stone of the wonderful and (oh, yeah) horrible real.