Looking in 50 years later: this Robert Frank exhibition ultimately creates a haunting picture of mid-century America, where power, vastness, and, at times, troubling emptiness mark the nation.

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THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of the publication of The Americans, Robert Frank's groundbreaking book of black-and-white photographs, is being celebrated with a major exhibition. Frank is one of the great living masters of photography and his seminal book captured a culture on the brink of social upheaval. The exhibit traces the artist's process of creating this once-controversial suite of photographs, which grew out of several cross-country road trips in 1955 and 1956.

Born Nov. 9, 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland, Frank was an outsider encountering much of the U.S. for the first time; he discovered its power, vastness, and, at times, troubling emptiness. Although Frank's depiction of American life was criticized when the book was released here in 1959, The Americans soon became recognized as a masterpiece of 20th-century art.

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The exhibition is the most comprehensive and in-depth exploration of Frank's original book ever undertaken and will feature more than 100 photographs, 17 books, and 15 manuscripts, as well as 22 contact sheets made from the artist's negatives. First published in France in 1958, The Americans remains arguably the single most important book of photographs published since World War II. The exhibit beans with an examination of the roots of The Americans through a display of Frank's earlier books and other series of photographs made in Europe, Peru, and New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In this prefatory group of works, the artist already had established his style of street photography and his thoughtful approach to sequencing his images.

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In 1955-56, with funding from a Guggenheim fellowship, Frank undertook a 10,000-mile Beat-inflected journey across more than 30 states. While crisscrossing the U.S., he shot over 27,000 photographs. The exhibition follows the artist's process through his production of more than 1,000 work prints and a year spent editing the images, selecting the photographs, and constructing the sequence. A large display comprised of rough work prints Frank made in 1956-57 reveals the themes he wanted his book to explore: racism, politics, consumer culture, families, and the way Americans lived, worked, and played. Vintage contact sheets and letters to photographer Walker Evans and author Jack Kerouac also help trace Frank's preparations and planning for the book.

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The centerpiece of the exhibition is the presentation of all 83 photographs from The Americans, often in rarely shown vintage prints, and in the sequence that Frank established. The first image in the book, "Parade--Hoboken, New Jersey" (1955) sets the tone for Frank's journey of discovery across the country: two...