‘It changed 20th-century art’: revisiting Robert Frank’s The Americans – in pictures

City fathers, Hoboken, New Jersey

Sarah Meister, executive director at Aperture, writes: ‘Part of what makes the Americans so noteworthy is the rhythm and poetry of its sequence. This second image deftly substitutes the obscured women in the window of the first for a suite of imperious, yet backward-looking ‘city fathers’, and decorative bunting in lieu of the American flag. Frank keeps us, as viewers, at a low angle and removed from both, heightening our attention to these differences’