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The American photographer Robert Frank, died September 10, 2019. Getty

It's the disappearance of a big name from photography. Swiss-born American Robert Frank died in Canada at age 94. He became famous with his album The Americans , released in the late 1950s. A book that revolutionized photography. He had been welcomed freshly on his way out.

With our correspondent in San Francisco , Eric de Salves

This album The Americans was first rejected by American publishers and it is in France in 1958 that it is published for the first time. His spontaneous pictures of the post-war American daily life in black and white are very raw and initially considered as bastardized, poorly framed, sad and depressing.

It's a work about loneliness, the black condition, the working class, poverty. It reveals the dark side of the American dream, the opposite of the triumphant America sold at the time in magazines.

Today, Americans is considered a classic. At 23, Robert Frank has laid the foundations of contemporary photography with his European immigrant eye. His book includes 83 photos taken during his trip across the United States between 1955 and 1956, in the great tradition of the Beat generation , the literary and artistic movement he was considered the last survivor.

It was his friend Jack Kerouac who preface The Americans in 1959. " With his little camera," wrote the author of On the Road, " Robert Frank has drawn from America a sad poem that has its place among the tragic poets of the world. "