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Cocksucker Blues.In 1957, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank was on the road. He was finishing two years of cross-country journeys, his wife and two young children in tow, snapping the 28,000 grainy black-and-white pictures that he would distill into the 83 images in his book The Americans. A culture-shifting landmark, with its deglamorized, deeply ambivalent view of the country, The Americans was a bracing and poetic antidote to the clarity and sentimentality of the images in magazines like Life, Vogue, and Fortune, where Frank worked as a freelancer after coming to the United States in 1947. “If you dig out-of-focus pictures, intense and unnecessary grain, converging verticals, a total absence of normal composition, and a relaxed, snapshot quality,” noted Popular Photographer editor James Zanutto, “then Robert Frank is for you.” The same year, Jack Kerouac published his own American odyssey, On the Road, a jazz-like literary improvisation quickly acclaimed by the New York Times...