USA on the road: Da The Americans di Robert Frank ad American Surfaces di Stephen Shore

Abstract

Robert Frank’s and Stephen Shore’s photographic reportages and their travels document an identity of the United States different from the conventional representations that usually show a successful country, able to enforce its social, economic, political, and aesthetics models. These reportages represent an other America, far from the stereotypes and full of contradictions: the places of common experience (almost non-places), the characters disillusioned and frustrated by the American dream, the banality of the situations represented, the commonplace, show that besides a winner’s imagery (like, recently, the one represented by Trump but also by Pete Souza, official photographer of Barack Obama) another imagery exists: that of the defeated, actually more responding to the reality of America.