A visual party to celebrate the birthday of 'The Americans'

Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans feels like a party. Long, lavish and loving — but never loud — the National Gallery of Art exhibition celebrates the 50th birthday of a small, quiet thing: a book.

First published in 1958 in France and a year later in the United States, The Americans consists of 83 black-and-white photographs that together form the Swiss-born artist's portrait of his adopted home.

Boiled down from some 27,000 frames Frank shot over the course of several trips across the nation between 1955 and 1957, the collection of images takes a pungent, poignant and at times critical look at America.

A country polarised in many ways, racially and otherwise. A country obsessed with celebrity, cars and the myths of a cowboy past. A country distrustful of outsiders. A country in transition.

Kind of like now, come to think of it. In the hoopla of the show, it is possible to lose sight of one thing. A book is not an exhibition that you hold in your lap.

It is a personal thing —one might even say a relationship — that you experience page by page, intimately.

Penta thrust

That was how Frank approached The Americans. Idiosyncratically. Passionately, but without sentimentality.

The photographs at the centre of the National Gallery's Looking In aren't examples of technical virtuosity. Some are blurred, with an off-kilter composition.

But they are all sharply observed scenes and deserve a close look. Here are five of them, and how the stories they tell — or the moods they suggest —evoke Frank's larger, poetic themes.

Trolley, New Orleans, 1955: It is probably the book's most famous photograph. The picture of a segregated trolley car in the deep South (whites up front, blacks in the back, one of whom looks almost pleadingly back at us) appears on the cover of The Americans.

It was shot just a few days after Frank himself was stopped by the police in McGehee, Arkansas, fingerprinted and interrogated for several hours.

His crime? Being a shabbily dressed Jew driving a car full of cameras with New York tags and having a foreign-sounding name.

The experience would change him, sharpening his eye for those on, or outside, the margins of society.

Movie premiere, Hollywood, 1955: Frank often liked to photograph people from behind their backs or off to the side.

But here he shoots Kim Novak, at the premiere of The Man With the Golden Arm, head-on.

The thing is, the glamorously dressed, if out-of-focus, actress is not the subject of the picture. Rather, it is the faces of the velvet-rope gawkers in the background.

Frank looks past what everyone is looking at, casting his gaze on the lookers themselves.

Candy store, New York City, 1955: Along with cars, cemeteries, cowboys, lunch counters, socialites, politicians and the American flag, jukeboxes make frequent appearances in The Americans.

There are four of them, including this glowing and gaudy altar around which a gaggle of teens congregates.

Frank was a fan of American music, especially jazz and blues but his attitude towards this icon of 1950s pop culture is something other than reverence.

There is a reason Beat author Jack Kerouac, in his introduction to Frank's book, wrote: “After seeing these pictures you end up not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.

'' According to curator Sarah Greenough, that melancholy isn't the result of something you see, but rather feel. It is the tension, she says, between “sound and silence''.

Store window, Washington DC, 1957: By the summer of 1956, Frank was pretty much done shooting pictures for The Americans.

But he worried that he didn't have enough pictures of politicians, whose demagoguery and failed promise were a recurring theme.

In January 1957, he made a short trip, from his home in New York to Washington, where the city was preparing for the second inauguration of president Dwight D. Eisenhower.

It is there that Frank found this subtly-jaundiced still life: a poster of the leader of the free world ... next to an empty suit.

US 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas, 1955: Picture after picture in The Americans illustrates our obsession with cars and the allure and danger of the open road; one shows the blanket-covered victim of a car accident.

In this shot, Frank stands outside his car, as his wife, Mary, cradles their children, Pablo and Andrea, in the front seat. On the one hand, the unseen artist is the outsider.

Frank famously said he was “always looking outside, trying to look inside, trying to tell something that's true''.

And yet. While The Americans avoids any direct consideration of the immigrant experience, this picture's subtext tells a different story.

Isn't the Swiss immigrant, who had come to this country ten years earlier, saying he has become an American himself?