Robert Frank

In this picture two citizens observe a parade, and a flag is on display to celebrate the patriotic occasion. The mood is dark, however, and the faces of the people are obscured, one of them by the flag itself.
The photograph is from Frank's book The Americans, first published in France in 1958 and in the United States the following year. In the years before museums and galleries took widespread notice of photography—that is, before the 1970s—books conceived and edited by the photographer played a leading role in bringing advanced photography to public notice. The Americans, one of the touchstones of this genre, helped to establish the artistic significance of what photographers call "a body of work"—a series of pictures unified by the author's sensibility and outlook rather than by a particular theme or by an assignment from a magazine editor.
In fact, the nominal subject of The Americans is so broad that it scarcely serves as an organizing principle. The book's coherence rests instead on Frank's talent for transforming fragments of observation into articulate symbols, all of them tinged by his caustic and forlorn vision of his adoptive country. The pictures are knit together, as well, by recurring icons of national identity, notably the flag, which appears and reappears on the scene like the sinister protagonist of a tragedy.